Do Voters Respond to the Economy or to News Reporting on the Economy? A Mediation Analysis

That the economy influences support for the government is a cornerstone of electoral research, but how this comes about is less understood. Largely due to limited availability of economic news data, research has not been able to estimate how much of the economy's effect on the vote is direct and how much is driven by media coverage of the economy. New data and automated text analysis make possible the first media-oriented mediation analysis of the economic vote. Using three million news articles from 15 developed countries, we demonstrate that about 30\% of the effect of growth is mediated through news sentiment. In contrast, the effect of unemployment on elections is direct. Deviations of economic reporting from the actual economy correlate with election outcomes, though not as much as is sometimes presumed, as we detail in two examples.