The Washington Post recently featured research from a new paper in American Economic Review by Barcelona GSE Affiliated Professor Ruben Durante (ICREA-UPF and Barcelona GSE) on "The Political Legacy of Entertainment TV" (with P. Pinotti and A. Tesei). The work focuses on entertainment television in Italy in the 1980s and whether it made voters more likely to support Silvio Berlusconi’s populist party, Forza Italia.
Why is entertainment TV linked to support for populism, and how did the researchers pin down causality? WaPo asked them in an interview titled, "Junk television promoted populist politics long before Fox News and Trump."
