Strategic Candidate Entry and Congressional

Elections in the Era of Fox News

Kevin Arceneaux Temple University
Johanna Dunaway Texas A&M University
Martin Johnson Louisiana State University
Ryan J. Vander Wielen Temple University

Abstract: Elections are designed to give voters the ability to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. For this to
work, voters must be presented with credible alternatives from which to choose. In the United States, as in other weak-party
systems, the decision to challenge an incumbent representative rests with individual, strategic-minded politicians who
carefully weigh the available information. We investigate the role that one source of information—partisan media—plays
in shaping electoral competition. We hypothesize that the haphazard expansion of the conservative Fox News Channel in the
decade after its 1996 launch influenced congressional elections by affecting the decision calculus of high-quality potential
candidates. Using congressional district-level data on the local availability of Fox News, we find that Fox News altered
Republican potential candidates’ perceptions about the vulnerability of Democratic incumbents, thereby changing their
entry patterns.

Verification Materials: The materials and nonproprietary data required to verify the computational reproducibility of
the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse
within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NGTWWJ. As the data concerning Fox News
penetration are proprietary data, they may not be posted publicly. These data may be leased from the Nielsen company
and are necessary to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article.

R
ecent scholarship finds that the introduction of
Fox News induced members of Congress to move
rightward (Clinton and Enamorado 2014), par-
ticularly Democrats serving in Republican-leaning dis-
tricts as the general election neared (Arceneaux et al.
2016). Yet we know little about why members of Congress
would respond to the emergence of a national news net-
work. Previous research shows that elected officials rely
on news reports to form perceptions about what their
constituents want (Herbst 1998; Kingdon 1984), and we
contend that this practice extends to the pool of potential
candidates (PCs) who make calculated decisions about
whether to run in national elections. Here, we consider
the possibility that the arrival of Fox News altered PCs’
view of the electoral landscape, leading strong Republi-
can candidates to challenge Democratic incumbents in
marginal districts.
Why would the presence of a national cable news
channel influence the behavior of PCs? Without a strong,
centralized party system, the decision to run for elec-
tive office in the United States is largely left to individual
candidates. Fearing that a loss may mar their chances of

Kevin Arceneaux is Thomas J. Freaney, Jr. Professor of Political Science, Director of Behavioral Foundations Lab, Faculty Affiliate of
Institute for Public Affairs, Temple University, 453 Gladfelter Hall, 1115 Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19122 (arceneau@temple.edu).
Johanna Dunaway is Associate Professor of Communication, Texas A&M University, 102 Bolton Hall, College Station, TX 77843-4234
(jdunaway@tamu.edu). Martin Johnson is Kevin P. Reilly, Sr. Chair in Political Communication, Manship School of Mass Communication,
Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University, Journalism Building, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (martinj@lsu.edu). Ryan J.
Vander Wielen is Professor of Political Science and (by courtesy) Economics, Temple University, 457 Gladfelter Hall, 1115 Polett Walk,
Philadelphia, PA 19122 (rvwielen@temple.edu).
Data regarding the ZIP code–level presence of Fox News were leased from the Nielsen Company. This was made possible through the
generous support of the Kevin P. Reilly, Sr. Chair of Political Communication, the Howard and Nantelle Mitchiner Gittinger Professorship,
and the R. Downs Poindexter Chair in Political Science at Louisiana State University.
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 00, No. 0, xxxx 2019, Pp. 1–18

C 2019, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12478

1
2 KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.
winning elections in the future, well-qualified, ambitious
PCs strategically choose to run for Congress when they
believe that some exogenous shock (e.g., a shift in vot-
ers’ attitudes) has increased their chances of winning in a
particular district (Fox and Lawless 2011; Jacobson 1989;
Maestas et al. 2006; Schlesinger 1966). Because electoral
success heavily depends on the partisan tendencies of the
voters (Bond, Covington, and Fleisher 1985), PCs are
more likely to run when they sense that shifts in parti-
san commitments within their district give them a fight-
ing chance to win (Bianco 1984; Cox and Katz 2002). In
making this determination, few PCs have the resources to
conduct systematic surveys and, thus, must rely largely on
their perceptions of the partisan landscape of their con-
gressional district (Arnold 1990; Broockman and Skovron
2018). Given the importance that national forces play in
PCs’ decisions to run for Congress (Jacobson 1989; Ja-
cobson and Kernell 1981) and the tendency for polit-
ical elites to presume that media coverage reflects and
shapes public opinion (Herbst 1998; Kingdon 1984), we
expect national coverage to inform PCs’ perceptions of
their congressional district’s partisan commitments even
in the absence of news coverage pertaining directly to their
district.
In order to understand how shifts in the media land-
scape influenced the behavior of PCs, we apply logic from
theories of rational anticipation that emphasize represen-
tatives’ dynamic assessments of changing district prefer-
ences to maximize electoral security (Clinton and Enam-
orado 2014; Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson 1995). We
expect that PCs similarly engage in rational anticipation,
but with respect to their electoral chances as challengers
seeking elected office.1 We evaluate our contention by
drawing on a unique exogenous shock to the news media
landscape in the United States: the emergence of the Fox
News Channel in the late 1990s.
Fox News provides a conservative alternative to the
mainstream national news programming that attempts
to provide equal coverage of both sides of political is-
sues and events (Groseclose and Milyo 2005; Martin and
Yurukoglu 2017). It did not emerge in media markets
at the same time, and its haphazard rollout from the
late 1990s through the early 2000s provides researchers
with rare exogenous variation in the availability of
1
Classical theories of representation portray officeholders’ percep-
tions of constituency preferences as imperfect (Fenno 1977; King-
don 1989; Miller and Stokes 1963). Three consistent elements unite
these theories: Representatives (1) seek congruency with their con-
stituents, (2) monitor the information environment for cues about
constituency opinion, and (3) change their behavior in response
to updates. We contend that these theories logically extend to the
behavior of ambitious PCs.
partisan news programming at the national level. Ex-
tant research shows that Fox News increased support for
Republican causes (DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; Hop-
kins and Ladd 2014; Martin and Yurukoglu 2017). We
anticipate that the presence of Fox News in congressional
districts also influenced PCs’ entry behavior by making
some Republican challengers perceive themselves as more
viable.2
To investigate the impact of Fox News on PCs’
strategic entry decisions, we obtained nationwide data of
Fox News’s market penetration at the ZIP code level from
1997 to 2009 from the Nielsen Company (see also Martin
and Yurukoglu 2017). These data are national in scope
and go beyond the incomplete samples used in previous
studies of the incremental Fox News rollout (Arceneaux
et al. 2016; Clinton and Enamorado 2014; DellaVigna and
Kaplan 2007; Hopkins and Ladd 2014). With these data,
we created a yearly measure of Fox News penetration in
every congressional district. We then merged our measure
of Fox News penetration into congressional elections
data to investigate the effects of Fox News’s presence
on the emergence of quality challengers in U.S. House
elections.
We find that the presence of Fox News increased the
likelihood that quality Republican challengers emerged in
districts that were tenuously held by Democratic incum-
bents. We conduct robustness and placebo tests to ensure
that these results are not spurious. Taken together, we of-
fer compelling evidence that the emergence of national
partisan news media altered candidate entry dynamics
in House elections. We then provide more exploratory
evidence suggesting that the change in PC behavior can
be attributed to changes in Republican PCs’ perceptions
of, rather than actual changes in, the electoral security
of Democratic incumbents. We conclude by considering
the normative implications of these findings. On the one
hand, the emergence of Fox News boosted electoral com-
petition in some districts, potentially facilitating demo-
cratic accountability. On the other hand, it did so in an
unbalanced way that may have advantaged congressional
Republicans. Whatever the case, we provide additional
evidence for the variety of ways in which the news media
have contributed to the “nationalization” of American
politics (Hopkins 2018), by increasing the role played
by national partisan politics in congressional elections
(Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway 2018; Hayes and Lawless 2018;
Trussler 2018) and casting political choices in more po-
larized terms (Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar 2017; Martin and
McCrain 2019).
2
Evidence suggests similar effects on partisan news viewers (Searles,
Smith, and Sui 2018).
STRATEGIC CANDIDATE ENTRY IN THE ERA OF FOX NEWS
To Run or Not to Run? It Comes
Down to Perception
The Anticipatory Calculus
Deciding to run for political office is not an easy de-
cision for those seeking a career in politics (Thomsen
2014, 2017). As in most careers, politicians typically start
by winning lower-level offices and working their way up.
Each step up the proverbial career ladder incurs some risk.
A state legislator who wants to be a member of the U.S.
House of Representatives cannot simply run whenever she
pleases (Maestas et al. 2006; Stone et al. 2010). A resound-
ing defeat could forestall her ability to attract the funds
from donors and support from party elites that one needs
to mount a formidable campaign in the future (Squire and
Smith 1984). To maintain a successful career in politics,
a “progressively ambitious” politician must consider her
chances of winning before choosing to run (Black 1972;
Rohde 1979). The standard theoretical model for how
PCs make this decision is a straightforward, rational cal-
culation (Carson, Engstrom, and Roberts 2007; Jacobson
and Kernell 1981):
E [r ] = pb − c , (1)
where E [r ] is the expected utility that a PC gains from
running for office, p is the anticipated probability of win-
ning if the PC runs, b is the expected benefit from winning
office, and c captures the costs associated with running
for office.3
Although the values of the variables in Equation (1)
vary across individuals (Fox and Lawless 2011), the type of
progressively ambitious PC who has built a career in pol-
itics by winning lower-level offices and working her way
upward most likely views the benefits of a congressional
seat as outweighing the costs of running (i.e., b > c ).4
As a result, the progressively ambitious PC’s decision to
run for higher office hinges critically on p. The value of
p is shaped by factors both external and internal to the
congressional district.
Research suggests that PCs consider the relative elec-
toral strength of their party within the district when de-
ciding whether to run (Stone and Maisel 2003). Even in
times of national calamity, a district in which the vot-
ers overwhelmingly affiliate with one party is unlikely to
3
The decision calculus forwarded by Rohde (1979) subscripts these
parameters to allow for comparisons to be made across an elected
official’s current and prospective offices.
4
It is important to emphasize that this statement applies to progres-
sively ambitious potential candidates. Some PCs may be content
in their current position, and, thus, they do not possess the pro-
gressive ambition to climb the elective office ladder (Maestas et al.
2006).
3
hand victory to a candidate from the opposing party. As
a result, PCs are sensitive to shifts in district partisan-
ship when they estimate p (Bianco 1984; Cox and Katz
2002). Although PCs can draw inferences about district
partisanship from the recent electoral history of the dis-
trict (Bond, Covington, and Fleisher 1985), they look for
additional cues (i.e., signs of change) that allow them
to more fluidly update p over the course of the 2-year
election cycle (Stone and Maisel 2003). There are several
factors that likely go into candidates’ perceptions of their
congressional districts, from conversations with residents
to an analysis of demographics. For instance, perceptions
of the electoral strength of one’s party in a district re-
late importantly to factors like fit with the national party
(Thomsen 2014, 2017), enthusiasm for the parties (Hill
2014; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000), national
mood (Wolak 2007), and the like.
We posit that the news media also play an important
role in this respect. Elected officials rely on news reports to
form beliefs about their constituents’ preferences (Linsky
1986; Yanovitzky 2002). As Herbst (1998) explains, politi-
cians often see news coverage as an indication of public
opinion, naı̈vely inferring shifts in public opinion from
shifts in news coverage. If incumbent politicians presume
that news media are a gauge of public sentiment, we antic-
ipate that PCs do so as well. If news media coverage within
a congressional district shifts in their direction, ambitious
PCs should correspondingly increase the value of p and, as
a result, their chance of running for Congress. Previous
scholarship focuses overwhelmingly on how local news
coverage shapes congressional elections (e.g., Snyder and
Strömberg 2010). Yet because national issues play a con-
siderable role in shaping voting behavior in congressional
elections (Gronke 2001; Jacobson and Kernell 1981), we
contend that PCs will also be sensitive to media coverage
with purely national content.
The Influence of National News Media on
Potential Candidates’ Perceptions
Our interest in studying the influence of national news
media on the strategic behavior of PCs is motivated by
an emerging body of evidence suggesting that the arrival
and proliferation of cable and high-speed internet—along
with the related decline of local newspapers—increasingly
nationalized news consumption and strengthened the
role of partisanship in attitudes and voting behavior. As
changes in media technology introduce more sources for
national news, local news outlets are displaced as peo-
ple opt for national, over local, news sources (Trussler
2018). As a result, political information has become more
4 KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.
nationalized, and local politics is more often understood
in the context of national party cues (Hopkins 2018). The
migration to national media outlets, like Fox News, am-
plifies the role of partisanship in voting behavior. These
audience shifts are linked to decreases in split-ticket vot-
ing at the county level (Darr, Hitt, and Dunaway 2018),
increases in negative affect toward out-party candidates
(Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar 2017), and reductions in the in-
cumbency advantage for House members, a phenomenon
historically attributed to the cultivation of cross-party
voting at the district level (Trussler 2018). As people move
away from the local information sources that provide
cues about member-specific criteria for voting (i.e., name
recognition, district service, legislative success), partisan
attitudes assume a more central role in the electorate’s
decision calculus.
Since the news coverage disseminated by broadcast
networks reaches all congressional districts, it has been
practically impossible to gauge the influence of shifts in
news coverage from these channels on congressional elec-
tions. Fortunately, the recent emergence of partisan news
media in the United States provides us with an unprece-
dented vantage point into the influence of the national
news media on the strategic decisions that PCs make. In
October 1996, the Fox News Channel began appearing on
cable television lineups as a conservative alternative to the
Cable News Network (Groseclose and Milyo 2005; Martin
and Yurukoglu 2017). The phased rollout of Fox News in
the late 1990s and early 2000s affected the degree to which
Fox News’s brand of conservative, pro-Republican na-
tional news coverage penetrated congressional districts.
Accordingly, it created exogenous variation across con-
gressional districts in the availability of national news cov-
erage that systematically advantaged one political party
over another.
If national news coverage is capable of shaping PCs’
beliefs and behaviors, the arrival of Fox News within a
congressional district should have shifted PCs’ percep-
tions of the relative strength of the Democratic and Re-
publican parties in the district, altering the value of p in
their entry calculus.5 Nevertheless, we would not expect
all PCs to experience uniform shifts in p with exposure
to Fox News. As we detail more formally in Appendix
A of the supporting Information (SI), PCs also have
5
There is suggestive historical evidence for the notion that partisan
news media shape PCs’ perceptions. During the 1800s, the geo-
graphic distribution of the partisan press correlated with the com-
petitiveness of congressional districts (Carson and Hood 2014).
While these findings are consistent with the causal effect of the
partisan press on candidates’ decisions to run, without as-if ran-
domizations, these results could reflect geographical differences in
the strength of party organizations.
access to other sources of information about the parti-
san dynamics in their congressional district. Republican
PCs in districts that have disproportionately advantaged
Democrats in past elections, for instance, may perceive
no meaningful improvement in their electoral prospects
even with Fox News present. The introduction of Fox
News is merely a single, albeit important, data point in
shaping p, so it should contribute to but not overwhelm
the information PCs glean from previous elections. Con-
sequently, we expect that increasing district-level expo-
sure to Fox News will lead PCs to overestimate the rel-
ative strength of the Republican Party as the district’s
partisan balance becomes increasingly favorable to Re-
publicans. We anticipate a stronger effect among Repub-
lican PCs for several reasons. Republican elites are more
likely to consider Fox News a credible source of infor-
mation (Bernstein, Bromley, and Meyer 2006); Fox News
grants on-air appearances to extreme Republican elites
at higher volumes than it does moderate ones (Padgett
2014); Fox News opinion programs dedicate significant
time to vilifying Democratic opponents (Smith and Sear-
les 2013); and Republican voters are in general more likely
to be influenced by Fox News’s messages (Arceneaux and
Johnson 2013; Hopkins and Ladd 2014). In turn, the
presence of Fox News should encourage ambitious Re-
publican PCs to challenge Democratic incumbents in in-
creasingly right-leaning districts, while having little effect
on the emergence of ambitious Democratic PCs. Stated
formally:
Republican PC Proposition: Fox News exposure
will increase Republican PCs’ perceived likeli-
hood of winning election.
Republican PC Corollary: The Fox News ef-
fect among Republican PCs will be moderated
downward by increasing district support for
the Democratic Party.
Democratic PC Proposition: Fox News exposure
will have no measurable effect on Democratic
PCs’ perceived likelihood of winning election.
Fox News Presence and Density
across Congressional Districts
Following a host of recent studies, we make use of the
incremental rollout of Fox News as an opportunity to
study the effects of access to partisan news and treat it
as a natural experiment (Arceneaux et al. 2016; Clin-
ton and Enamorado 2014; DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007;
STRATEGIC CANDIDATE ENTRY IN THE ERA OF FOX NEWS 5

Hopkins and Ladd 2014; Martin and Yurukoglu 2017). TABLE 1 Balance Test
At the outset of the 2000s, Fox News reached a fraction of
audiences, but by 2012, it reached 1.9 million prime- All
time viewers (Pew Research Center 2015). The arrival Members Democrats Republicans
and penetration of Fox News into districts introduced Democratic −1.47e-06 −0.0015 −3.95e-05
exogenous variation in national news menus across Support (0.0004) (0.0009) (0.0012)
districts. Party Unity 0.0039∗ 0.0050∗ −0.0003
To test our predictions, we use a novel data set con- (0.0006) (0.0008) (0.0010)
taining nationwide ZIP code–level information on cable Quality −0.0151 −0.0152 −0.0115
systems’ carriage of Fox News during the years of its ex- Challenger (0.0125) (0.0154) (0.0162)
pansion, from 1997 to 2009. The Nielsen Company col- Spending Gap −0.0016 0.0100∗ −0.0066
lects data on the availability of cable channels provided (0.0035) (0.0045) (0.0043)
by each cable service provider across the nation within Freshman −0.0100 0.0171 −0.0109
each ZIP code on a yearly basis.6 These data are national (0.0145) (0.0183) (0.0191)
in scope, going beyond most previous studies of the in- Party of the −0.0206 0.0201 0.0534
cremental Fox News rollout that relied on an incomplete President (0.0311) (0.0410) (0.0420)
sample of large media markets; (Arceneaux et al. 2016; Midterm 0.0254∗ 0.0227 0.0045
DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; Clinton and Enamorado (0.0102) (0.0133) (0.0132)
2014; Hopkins and Ladd 2014; but see Martin and Yu- Change in GDP 0.0021 −0.0207∗ 0.0167∗
rukoglu, 2017).7 With these data, we are able to generate (0.0029) (0.0037) (0.0038)
a continuous measure of Fox News density per district Lagged Vote 0.0015∗ 0.0031∗ −0.0015
that ranges from 0 (absence of Fox News) to 1 (Fox News Share (0.0007) (0.0010) (0.0012)
∗
is available to all households), going beyond the binary Constant 0.4104 0.3037∗ 0.9012∗
measure of Fox News presence often used in the extant (0.0644) (0.0756) (0.1632)
literature. In our design, congressional districts are the N 1,759 874 885
research subjects and the density of Fox News is our treat- F 11.43 31.79 34.49
ment variable. Adjusted R2 0.0507 0.2410 0.2543
Note: The table presents the multiple linear regression results of Fox
News density on the observed characteristics of the congressional
Testing a Key Assumption about the Fox districts. Standard errors are in parentheses.
∗
p ≤ .05.
News Rollout
It is important to note that our “natural experiment” is incumbents. Since Fox News density and party unity
not a truly randomized experiment, and we must assume are measured contemporaneously, Fox News would have
that Fox News unfurled in an as-if random fashion (Dun- needed to anticipate a member’s partisan loyalty in order
ning 2008). To assess this assumption, we conducted a for this imbalance to indicate selection bias, which strikes
balance test to probe the relationship between the den- us as unlikely. Furthermore, we find that Fox News density
sity of Fox News and the observed characteristics of the is statistically unrelated to lagged party unity scores. We
congressional districts (Table 1). We do not find much observe imbalances in Fox News density between midterm
evidence of imbalances on the various covariates, and and presidential elections because the largest marginal
the minor imbalances that we uncover do not threaten increase in density occurred during the 105th Congress
causal inference. (1997–98), a midterm election. Removing this congress
Among all members, Fox News density is positively from the equation eliminates the imbalance. Finally, im-
related to Party Unity for Democratic and Republican balances on Lagged Vote Share indicate that Fox News
6
These Nielsen FOCUS data are proprietary and confidential, but
density was higher in districts with “safe” incumbents—
they are available for lease by scholars. Democrats and Republicans alike. This imbalance is at
7
Using the DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) data to measure the
odds with the notion that Fox News targeted congres-
presence and density of Fox News at the House district level yields sional districts where they could exert the greatest influ-
significant differences compared to the more comprehensive mea- ence on elections.
sure we introduce in this study. In fact, the district-level measure of When restricting the data to Democratic and Re-
the proportion of cable subscribers with access to Fox News used by
Arceneaux et al. (2016) correlates with our measure of district-level publican districts, separately, we find few additional
Fox News penetration at only 0.22. imbalances. Although Fox News density is positively
6 KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.
related to Spending Gap, we can dismiss selection bias
because the Fox News density measure temporally pre-
cedes candidate expenditures. Finally, imbalance in the
national change in GDP is simply an artifact of the time
of the Fox News rollout, with Fox News density being
highest during the late congresses in the data set.
Of course, we could be wrong, and, more fundamen-
tally, we are not able to assess balance on unobserved
characteristics. Consequently, we conduct a number of
robustness checks, including a matching analysis, to pro-
vide further confidence in our findings.
The Electoral Effects of Fox News
Methods and Measures
To test whether the presence of Fox News altered the
strategic calculations of ambitious PCs, we examine all
U.S. House races between 1998 and 2010 that involved
an incumbent seeking reelection, using a pooled cross-
sectional time-series analysis.8 During this period, there
was considerable variation in Fox News density across
time and congressional districts.9 By excluding open-seat
races from this analysis, we focus on the elections that
tend to discourage the entry of ambitious PCs (Jacobson
and Kernell 1981), and so we likely understate the ex-
tent to which Fox News affected PCs’ entry patterns. In
addition, this design allows us to evaluate the role that in-
cumbents’ electoral performance and legislative behavior
play in these decisions.
We estimate the model of quality challenger entry as
follows:
logit[Pr(QualityChall = 1)] = ␤0 + ␤1 FoxDensity
+ ␤2 DemSupport
+ ␤3 FoxDensity
× DemSupport
+ ␤x + ⑀, (2)
where Quali tyC hall ∈ {0, 1} is an indicator measuring
whether the incumbent faced a general election challenger
8
Since we are interested in candidate emergence, we consider all
races with incumbents seeking reelection, and not just those that
are contested. However, restricting our attention to contested races
does not substantively alter our results.
9
With the exception of the 2010 House elections, for which we only
have access to Nielsen Company data from 2009, our measure of
Fox News penetration is based on the 2-year period preceding the
House elections (e.g., 1997–98 for the 1998 House elections).
who had held previous elective office, F ox Dens i ty ∈
[0, 1] measures the proportion of the district that re-
ceived Fox News, and DemSuppor t ∈ (0, 100) is the
percentage of the two-party vote received by the Demo-
cratic presidential nominee in the district, using the cur-
rent presidential election results in presidential election
years and using the preceding presidential election re-
sults for midterm election years.10 The use of a di-
chotomous variable to measure candidate quality has be-
come convention in studies of congressional elections (see
Jacobson 2004). While other, more detailed, measures ex-
ist (e.g., Bond, Covington, and Fleisher 1985; Krasno and
Green 1988; Lublin 1994; Squire 1989), the simple di-
chotomous measure has “typically proven just as reliable
a predictor of a competitive House election” (Carson and
Roberts 2011, 151).11 The x term denotes a vector of
control variables that includes measures of party unity,
gap in campaign spending between the challenger and
incumbent, freshman status, affiliation with the presi-
dent’s party, midterm elections, change in gross domestic
product (GDP), and lagged incumbent vote share; and
␤ denotes the vector of coefficients.12 These are standard
measures of electoral vulnerability and district competi-
tiveness (Koger and Lebo 2017). We estimate the model
using logistic regression, clustering the standard errors by
congressional districts.
Results
The results of the model in Equation (2) are shown
in Table 2 for both Democratic and Republican
10
This is a commonly used timing convention for measuring
district-level partisanship (see, e.g., Abramowitz, Alexander, and
Gunning 2006; Jacobson 2015). Using alternative operationaliza-
tions of this variable—such as using preceding presidential elec-
tion results for both presidential and midterm election years, or
applying the 1996 presidential election results to all subsequent
elections—does not substantively alter our results.
11
As shown in SI Appendix B, using a more refined measure of
challenger quality does not substantively alter the following results.
12
Party Unity captures the percentage of the time members vote
with their party on votes that divide the two parties. Spending Gap
measures the natural logarithm of challenger spending less the nat-
ural logarithm of incumbent spending (Jacobson 1980). Freshman
indicates whether the incumbent is running for reelection follow-
ing her first term in office. Party of the President indicates whether
the member belongs to the president’s party. Midterm is coded 1
for members of the president’s party running in a midterm elec-
tion, –1 for members of the president’s opposition party running
in midterm elections, and 0 for members running in presidential
elections. Change in GDP measures the change in GDP over the
year preceding the elections, and it is coded for in-party status.
Lagged Vote Share is the share of the two-party vote received by the
incumbent in her previous election.
STRATEGIC CANDIDATE ENTRY IN THE ERA OF FOX NEWS 7

TABLE 2 House Incumbents Facing a Quality Challenger, 1998–2010

Democratic Incumbents Republican Incumbents

Fox Density 3.6783∗ 6.1436∗ −0.8531 −2.5551
(1.3587) (2.1353) (2.1889) (2.7386)
Democratic Support −0.0202 0.0494 0.0660 −0.0033
(0.0166) (0.0338) (0.0360) (0.0470)
Fox Density × Democratic Support −0.0714∗ −0.1160∗ 0.0197 0.0477
(0.0204) (0.0351) (0.0453) (0.0585)
Party Unity 0.0060 −0.0193
(0.0122) (0.0143)
Spending Gap 0.3091∗ 0.4306∗
(0.0734) (0.0789)
Freshman 0.4494 0.2792
(0.2495) (0.2394)
Party of the President 0.1584 −1.6717∗
(0.6329) (0.5928)
Midterm −0.1838 0.2515
(0.2078) (0.1798)
Change in GDP 0.0122 0.1199∗
(0.0552) (0.0541)
Lagged Vote Share −0.0311 −0.0321
(0.0166) (0.0188)
Constant −0.0694 −1.7523 −4.5450∗ 4.5835
(1.1116) (1.7689) (1.7574) (3.2911)
N 1,429 874 1,349 885
Note: Results are presented for the model shown in Equation (2), with the dependent variable measuring whether the incumbent faced a
general election challenger who had held previous elective office (dichotomously coded). Clustered standard errors are in parentheses.
∗p ≤ .05.

incumbents.13 In line with our expectations, we find that
the Fox Density constitutive and interaction terms are
statistically significant and in the predicted direction for
Democratic incumbents, but not statistically meaningful
for Republican incumbents.14 When Democratic district
support was at low levels for Democratic incumbents (i.e.,
Republican-leaning districts), Fox News increased the
likelihood that they faced quality Republican challengers.
High levels of Democratic district support moderated the
Fox News effect by suppressing the entry of quality Re-
publican challengers. Conversely, there is no statistically
13
See SI Appendix C for the results of additional model specifi-
cations that include fixed effects and random intercepts for year,
state, and congressional district. The alternative specifications yield
substantively similar results.
14
See SI Appendix D for alternative model specifications that (1)
exclude the covariates with missing values—those responsible for
reductions in the sample size—and (2) include a different oper-
ationalization of the Lagged Vote Share variable to retain miss-
ing values. The alternative specifications yield substantively similar
results.
discernible Fox News effect on the likelihood that Repub-
lican incumbents faced quality Democratic challengers.
Figure 1 presents the predicted probabilities that
Democratic (Panel [a]) and Republican (Panel [b]) in-
cumbents faced quality challengers during the period of
analysis as a function of Fox News density and district
partisanship, using the results of the complete models
(with controls) from Table 2. Fox News density is eval-
uated over the unit interval, which accounts for districts
ranging from no Fox News presence to those with com-
plete saturation.15 We simulate Republican-leaning dis-
tricts by setting the Democratic Support variable to the
1st percentile, and Democratic-leaning districts to the
99th percentile of this variable, keeping other covari-
ates fixed at their means.16 We use 83.5% confidence
15
Using the diagnostic recommendations proposed by Hain-
mueller, Mummolo, and Xu (2019), we find that the results are
not reliant on “extrapolation or interpolation of the functional
form to an area where there is no or only sparse data” (165).
16
Percentiles are separately recorded for Democratic and Repub-
lican districts to faithfully represent the ranges of partisanship.
8 KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.

FIGURE 1 Predicted Probability of in Republican-leaning districts, however, the increasing

Incumbent Facing a Quality availability of Fox News substantially increased the prob-
Challenger ability that they faced a quality challenger. For Demo-
cratic incumbents, going from no Fox News to complete
(a) Democratic Incumbents penetration translates into a 39.6 percentage point in-
crease in the probability of facing a quality challenger. We
1.0

Republican−Leaning District
Democratic−Leaning District
Probability of Facing Quality Challenger

also find a negative effect of Fox News density on quality

challenger entry for Democratic incumbents represent-
0.8

ing Democratic-leaning districts. While somewhat un-

expected, this finding comports with existing work that
0.6

documents the polarizing effect of the partisan media

(Levendusky 2013).
Secondary analyses presented in SI Appendix E pro-
0.4

vide evidence that these findings are not an artifact of

changes in the likelihood of quality challengers winning
0.2

primary elections. Fox News did not measurably alter the

success rates of quality challengers in primary elections.
Furthermore, we show in SI Appendix F that a more
0.0

detailed accounting of time, to capture possible time-

0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Fox Density dependent effects of Fox News, does not substantively
change our results.
(b) Republican Incumbents
1.0

Republican−Leaning District
Democratic−Leaning District
Probability of Facing Quality Challenger

Robustness Checks
0.8

Matching Analysis
0.6

As a robustness check, we also use a matching analysis

to estimate the effect of Fox News on the emergence of
quality challengers. In doing so, we reduce imbalances
0.4

on observables. We begin the analysis by preprocessing

the data via matching methods and then estimating the
0.2

Fox News “treatment” effect using a logistic regression

model identical in its specification to Equation (2). This
approach establishes greater independence between the
0.0

0.0 0.2
Note: Simulations use the complete models (with controls)
presented in Table 2. Panels present 83.5% confidence inter-
vals, which are appropriate for achieving a type I error rate of
5% (i.e., 95% confidence).
intervals so that the lack of an overlap in confidence in-
tervals indicates statistical significance at the 0.05 alpha
level (e.g., Goldstein and Healy 1995).
Republican incumbents experienced no statistically
meaningful variation in their likelihood of facing quality
challengers as a function of Fox News, irrespective of dis-
trict partisan composition. For Democratic incumbents
0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 treatment (i.e., presence of high Fox News density) and
Fox Density the key explanatory variables (Ho et al. 2007). We match
on those characteristics of the districts that are plausibly
related to the emergence of quality challengers—the ex-
planatory variables that appear in Equation (2), denoted
x. We use the genetic matching algorithm in the R package
MatchIt (Ho et al. 2011). Introduced by Diamond and
Sekhon (2013), this method identifies weights to optimize
the balance of all covariates. Since our measure of Fox
News density is continuous, we must dichotomize it for
the matching analysis. We do so by defining treated dis-
tricts as those where Fox News density was above the me-
dian and comparison (“control”) districts as those where
it was below the median.17

17
Reasonable variation in these percentiles does not substantively Since we match replacement, the regression analysis includes
alter our results. the optimal weights found in the matching process (Dehejia and
STRATEGIC CANDIDATE ENTRY IN THE ERA OF FOX NEWS 9

TABLE 3 Balance of Districts Using Genetic Matching

Democratic Incumbents
Unmatched Data Matched Data
Treated Mean Control Mean Difference Treated Mean Control Mean Difference
Democratic Support 62.0304 55.2624 6.7681∗ 62.0304 61.4742 0.5562
Party Unity 93.1460 86.5102 6.6358∗ 93.1460 93.1313 0.0147
Spending Gap −2.3881 −1.9505 −0.4376∗ −2.3881 −2.4132 0.0251
Freshman 0.1656 0.2109 −0.0453 0.1656 0.1571 0.0085
Party of the President 0.3800 0.5856 −0.2056∗ 0.3800 0.3800 0.0000
Midterm 0.0828 0.1638 −0.0810 0.0828 0.0934 −0.0106
Change in GDP −0.7461 1.4921 −2.2381∗ −0.7461 −0.6406 −0.1055
Lagged Vote Share 67.7714 63.0894 4.6820∗ 67.7714 67.4509 0.3205
Propensity Score Distance 0.6192 0.4450 0.1742∗ 0.6192 0.6146 0.0046

Republican Incumbents
Unmatched Data Matched Data
Treated Mean Control Mean Difference Treated Mean Control Mean Difference
Democratic Support 43.9867 44.3442 −0.3575 43.9867 43.8659 0.1208
Party Unity 91.1549 90.6109 0.5440 91.1549 91.1706 −0.0157
Spending Gap −2.1003 −2.1457 0.0454 −2.1003 −2.0831 −0.0172
Freshman 0.1509 0.1456 0.0053 0.1509 0.1509 0.0000
Party of the President 0.7640 0.4768 0.2872∗ 0.7640 0.7640 0.0000
Midterm 0.1679 −0.0970 0.2649∗ 0.1679 0.1703 −0.0024
Change in GDP 2.2540 −0.8152 3.0692∗ 2.2540 2.2088 0.0453
Lagged Vote Share 62.7116 62.4094 0.3021 62.7116 62.4750 0.2366
Propensity Score Distance 0.5177 0.4182 0.0994∗ 0.5177 0.5160 0.0017
Note: The table presents the balance across treated and control groups before (i.e., unmatched) and after (i.e., matched) preprocessing
using a genetic matching algorithm.
∗
denotes differences at p ≤ .05.

Matching successfully balances observables in dis-
tricts with Democratic and Republican incumbents
across the treated and control groups (Table 3). The
statistically significant differences across the treated and
control groups that existed in some of the variables
in the unmatched data are eliminated in the matched
data (see Figure 2). To achieve balance, we discard 209
(for Democratic incumbents) and 254 (for Republican
incumbents) unmatched observations, leaving 665 (for
Democratic incumbents) and 631 (for Republican in-
cumbents) matched districts.
The matching analysis shows that, even with prepro-
cessing and dichotomizing Fox News exposure, the same
general patterns emerge regarding the entry of quality
challengers (Table 4). In short, for Democratic incum-
bents, higher levels of Fox News encouraged the entry
Wahba 1999; Hill, Reiter, and Zanutto 2004; Stuart 2010). We arrive
at substantively similar results without accounting for weights.
of quality Republican challengers relative to the control
group (i.e., the significant positive constitutive term),
but this effect was moderated downward by increasing
Democratic support in the district (i.e., the significant
negative interaction term). We see no equivalent, statis-
tically discernible effect of Fox News among Republican
incumbents. For both the Democratic and Republican
models, these results are robust to the inclusion of co-
variates. Figure 3 shows the difference in the likelihood
of a quality challenger emerging between treated and
control districts, conditional on district partisanship. To
simulate Democratic-leaning districts, we again set the
Democratic Support variable to the 99th percentile, and
for Republican-leaning districts, we set it to the 1st per-
centile. All other variables are held at their means. We
use 95% confidence intervals to establish statistical sig-
nificance at the 0.05 alpha level by verifying that zero
does not fall inside the confidence interval for the pre-
dicted treatment effect. For Democratic incumbents, Fox
10 KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.

FIGURE 2 Histograms of Density of Propensity Scores before (Raw)

and after (Matched) Matching

Raw Treated Matched Treated

(a)

2.5

2.5
2.0

2.0
1.5

1.5
Density

Density
1.0

1.0
0.5

0.5
0.0

0.0
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Propensity Score Propensity Score

Raw Control Matched Control

1.5

2.0
1.5
1.0
Density

Density
1.0
0.5

0.5
0.0

0.0

0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8
Propensity Score Propensity Score

Raw Treated Matched Treated

(b)
5

5
4

4
Density

Density
3

3
2

2
1

1
0

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7
Propensity Score Propensity Score

Raw Control Matched Control

4

5
4
3
Density

Density
3
2

2
1

1
0

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7
Propensity Score Propensity Score

Note: Propensity score distributions for Democratic incumbents are shown in Panel (a) and
Republican incumbents in Panel (b).
STRATEGIC CANDIDATE ENTRY IN THE ERA OF FOX NEWS 11

TABLE 4 House Incumbents Facing a Quality Challenger, 1998–2010–Matched Data

Democratic Incumbents Republican Incumbents

Fox Treatment 3.2976∗ 3.6483∗ 0.3297 0.3479
(1.4199) (1.4837) (1.4684) (1.5361)
Democratic Support −0.0562∗ −0.0039 0.0797∗ 0.0418
(0.0192) (0.0251) (0.0263) (0.0317)
Fox Treatment × Democratic Support −0.0557∗ −0.0614∗ −0.0091 −0.0096
(0.0245) (0.0256) (0.0315) (0.0331)
Party Unity −0.0321 −0.0215
(0.0169) (0.0159)
Spending Gap 0.3693∗ 0.4162∗
(0.0965) (0.0916)
Freshman 0.2696 0.3726
(0.3164) (0.2935)
Party of the President −0.3187 −1.5377∗
(0.7090) (0.6498)
Midterm −0.3064 −0.0109
(0.2555) (0.2212)
Change in GDP 0.0955 0.1445∗
(0.0656) (0.0602)
Lagged Vote Share −0.0213 −0.0134
(0.0187) (0.0218)
Constant 1.8538 3.9583∗ −4.8841∗ 1.1057
(1.1273) (1.8122) (1.2185) (3.0238)
N 665 665 631 631
Note: Results are presented for the model shown in Equation (2) using matched data, with dependent variable measuring whether the
incumbent faced a general election challenger who had held previous elective office. Standard errors are in parentheses.
∗p ≤ .05.

News, on average, decreased the likelihood of a qual-
ity challenger emerging in Democratic-leaning districts
by approximately 14.8 percentage points and increased
the likelihood of quality challenger entry in Republican-
leaning districts by roughly 32.6 percentage points. There
is no evidence of a treatment effect for Republican
incumbents.
Placebo Test
We also conducted a placebo test to see whether Fox
News density predicted past electoral outcomes. Since
the future cannot affect the past, if we find a relation-
ship between Fox News presence and previous electoral
outcomes, we should be concerned that the Fox News
rollout happened in a way systematically related to the
outcomes we are interested in studying. A more detailed
discussion and full results for the placebo test are located
in SI Appendix G. We find no evidence that Fox News
presence systematically correlates with previous election
outcomes.
The Effect of Fox News on Potential
Candidate Perceptions
Although we find that Fox News influenced the emer-
gence of quality challengers, as we predicted, it is less clear
whether these results were caused by Fox News’s shap-
ing of PCs’ perceptions, as theorized. Other mechanisms,
like elite coordination, could generate the same observ-
able implications. It is a more challenging task to investi-
gate changes in the ways that PCs think about elections,
and for that reason we consider the following analysis to
be somewhat more speculative.
A common impediment to performing analyses of
this variety is the inability to identify the population of
such candidates (Fox and Lawless 2011). Fortunately, the
Candidate Emergence Study (CES) provides data on the
electoral ambitions of PCs during the late 1990s and early
2000s, conveniently during the years U.S. cable providers
expanded the availability of Fox News across the coun-
try. CES investigators sampled congressional districts and
surveyed political experts in each district to identify PCs.
12
FIGURE 3 Predicted Fox Treatment Effect on
Quality Challenger Emergence
Democratic Incumbents
Republican Incumbents
Democratic
Republican
Lean of District
Democratic
Republican
−0.6 −0.4 −0.2 0 0.2
Predicted Fox Treatment Effect
Note: Simulated treatment effects use the complete models (with
controls) presented in Table 4. Figure presents 95% confidence
intervals to test point predictions.
From there, CES investigators surveyed political-expert-
identified PCs as well as all of the state representatives and
state senators whose districts overlapped with the sam-
pled congressional district boundaries. This procedure
yielded 1,190 PCs who responded to the first CES survey
conducted in 1997 and 1998.
The PCs were selected because they are the kinds of
individuals who typically run for Congress. The majority
of the respondents we examine were state legislators at
the time of the survey (69.0%), with another 13.0% hold-
ing some other elective office.18 Consequently, the survey
respondents are precisely the types of people we can as-
sume to be politically ambitious (Aldrich and Thomsen
2017).19 They had incentives to monitor and understand
the political conditions of their immediate surroundings
as well as be particularly calculated in making a decision
to run for Congress (Jacobson 1989). For this reason, in-
cluding only quality candidates like these in our analysis is
akin to a least likely cases design, disadvantaging a finding
consistent with a Fox News effect.20
The CES included a variety of questions about the
political calculations of these PCs. We focus here on PCs’
18
Restricting the following analysis to officeholders, so as to con-
form to conventional definitions of quality candidates, does not
substantively alter the following results.
19
Only a small fraction (9.4%) of those who had not held elective
office at the time of the survey expressed “no interest” in doing so.
20
See SI Appendix H for more details regarding the sample of PCs.
KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.
perception of the incumbent’s strength—a critical factor
in shaping their self-assessed likelihood of winning (i.e.,
the p term in Equation 1). The survey item asked respon-
dents to estimate how likely the following is: “The incum-
bent U.S. Representative will win the general election in
1998, if he/she wins the primary.” The variable is coded
to range from 1 to 7, with higher values corresponding to
perceptions of greater incumbent security.21
If Fox News influenced PC perceptions as we theo-
rize, increasing the availability of Fox News should lead
Republican PCs in Republican-leaning districts to view
Democratic incumbents as more vulnerable. Conversely,
we expect to see little effect of Fox News on Democratic
PCs’ perceptions of Republican incumbents’ strength. To
evaluate these propositions, we estimate the following or-
dinal logistic regression model:
logit[Pr(LikeIncSucc > j )] = ␤0 + ␤1 FoxDensity
0.4 0.6
+ ␤2 DemSupport
+ ␤3 FoxDensity
× DemSupport
+ ␦z + ⑀,
for j = 1, . . . , 7, (3)
where FoxDensity is measured as discussed above and
DemSuppor t ∈ (0, 100) measures the percentage of the
two-party vote received by President Clinton in the 1996
election in that district. The vector z denotes the addi-
tional PC-level covariates, including the PC’s self-assessed
ideology, gender, educational attainment, age, duration
of residency in the House district, income, likelihood of
winning the congressional seat should he or she run, per-
sonal attraction to a career in the House, and likelihood
of running for the House in the 1998 election (with cor-
responding vector of coefficients, ␦). These covariates ac-
count for various (available and measurable) characteris-
tics that could conceivably influence a PC’s assessment of
the incumbent’s likelihood of winning, and their inclu-
sion ensures that even minor imbalances do not influence
our results. Since we theorize that Democrats and Repub-
licans give different weights to Fox News in formulating
their assessments of district electoral circumstances and
we are primarily interested in understanding the behav-
ior of general election challengers, we estimate the model
separately for Democratic and Republican PCs in dis-
tricts with out-party incumbents (i.e., Democratic PCs in
districts with Republican incumbents, and vice versa).
We estimate the model for both unmatched and
matched data, as we did for the analysis of the House
21
No respondents answered “not sure” to this question.
STRATEGIC CANDIDATE ENTRY IN THE ERA OF FOX NEWS 13

TABLE 5 Perceptions of the Likelihood of Incumbent Reelection among PCs in Districts with
Out-Party Incumbents

Unmatched Data Matched Data

Democratic PCs Republican PCs Democratic PCs Republican PCs
∗
Fox Density (U)/Treatment (M) 5.4068 −14.8756 2.1671 −12.8018∗
(4.1877) (6.6499) (2.3024) (4.2194)
Democratic Support 0.0472 −0.0487 0.0175 −0.0867
(0.0390) (0.0691) (0.0413) (0.0547)
Fox D/T × Democratic Support −0.1239 0.2645∗ −0.0524 0.2513∗
(0.0877) (0.1226) (0.0496) (0.0796)
PC Ideology 0.1325 0.0138 0.2029 0.2421
(0.1210) (0.2633) (0.1258) (0.2622)
PC Gender −0.0200 −0.0713 0.1937 −1.3622
(0.3435) (0.6813) (0.3869) (0.8634)
PC Educational Attainment −0.2804 0.1841 −0.1160 0.7114
(0.1624) (0.3301) (0.2027) (0.3592)
PC Age −0.0495 −0.0505 −0.2197 −0.3016
(0.1542) (0.1391) (0.1547) (0.2255)
PC Duration of District Residency −0.0535 0.2639 −0.2311 0.3419
(0.2083) (0.2290) (0.2217) (0.2738)
PC Income 0.2705∗ −0.0132 0.3224∗ 0.2236
(0.1042) (0.1151) (0.1094) (0.1625)
PC Assessment of Likelihood of Winning −0.4010∗ −0.2112 −0.3664∗ −0.2526
(0.0867) (0.1191) (0.0891) (0.1355)
PC Attraction to Career in House −0.0006 −0.0725 −0.1153 −0.1163
(0.0765) (0.0983) (0.0811) (0.1245)
PC Likelihood of Running −0.2025 −0.3176∗ −0.0793 −0.3931∗
(0.1189) (0.0721) (0.1191) (0.1429)
N 240 125 182 93
Note: Results are presented for the model shown in Equation (3), with the dependent variable measuring PC’s perception that the out-party
incumbent will win the upcoming general election (on a 7-point scale). Clustered standard errors are in parentheses for unmatched data,
and standard errors are in parentheses for matched data.
∗p ≤ .05.

data above. We used the same genetic matching algorithm
discussed above on the covariates in vector z of Equation
(3).22 In the matching analysis, we again dichotomize the
Fox News density using a median split, and then use a
parametric analysis on the matched data.
Table 5 shows the results of the model appearing in
Equation (3) for Democratic and Republican PCs in dis-
tricts with out-party incumbents, for both the unmatched
and matched data.23 The results are remarkably consis-
22
Preprocessing substantially improved covariate balance. See SI
Appendix I for details.
23
See SI Appendix C for the results of additional model specifica-
tions that include fixed effects and random intercepts for state and
congressional district. Note that the PC perceptions data pertain to
a single election cycle, so we do not account for time (i.e., year) as we
did in the alternative specifications for the above analysis of House
tent across the unmatched and matched data for both
parties. Figure 4 presents the predicted probabilities that
a PC perceives the out-party incumbent as being at least
“somewhat likely” to win reelection, using the estimates
from the unmatched results in Table 5. Republican PCs in
Republican-leaning districts experienced a dramatic de-
cline in their assessment of the Democratic incumbent’s
likelihood of reelection with increasing levels of Fox News
in their district. They exhibited, on average, a 51.7 per-
centage point drop in reporting that they perceived the
Democratic incumbent as likely to win reelection over
the range of Fox News density. Republican PCs in districts
incumbents facing a quality challenger. The alternative specifica-
tions yield substantively similar results. We also note that we find
evidence of common support for these data using the Hainmueller,
Mummolo, and Xu (2019) diagnostics.
14 KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.

FIGURE 4 Predicted Probability That PC FIGURE 5 Predicted Fox Treatment Effect on

Perceives Out-Party Incumbent as PC Perceptions of the Out-Party
Likely to Win Reelection Incumbent’s Being Likely to Win
Reelection
(a) Democratic PCs
1.0
Estimation That Republican Incumbent Will Win

Democratic PCs
Republican PCs

Democratic
0.8
0.6

Lean of District
Republican
0.4

Democratic
0.2

Republican−Leaning District Republican

0.0

Democratic−Leaning District
−1 −0.8 −0.6 −0.4 −0.2 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 Predicted Fox Treatment Effect
Fox Density
Note: The figure displays the simulated treatment effect of Fox
(b) Republican PCs
News on the probability that the PC estimates the out-party in-
1.0
Estimation That Democratic Incumbent Will Win

cumbent as having at least a “somewhat likely” chance of retain-

ing the seat in the upcoming election (i.e., category 5 or greater
along the 7-point scale). We use 95% confidence intervals since
we want to examine whether the point predictions are statistically
0.8

different from zero.

0.6

Therefore, these predictions bear a striking resemblance

to the quality challenger entry patterns seen in Figure 1.
Figure 5 similarly shows the predicted Fox News treat-
0.4

ment effect on PC perceptions of the likelihood that the

out-party incumbent is at least “somewhat likely” to win
0.2

reelection, using the matched results. These predictions

are consistent with those from the analysis of the un-
Republican−Leaning District
matched data. Republican PCs in Republican-leaning dis-
0.0

Democratic−Leaning District
0.0 0.2
Note: Panels report the predicted probability that a PC estimates
the out-party incumbent as having at least a “somewhat likely”
chance of retaining the seat in the upcoming election (i.e., cate-
gory 5 or greater along the 7-point scale), using the unmatched
data. We present 83.5% confidence intervals to allow for evalua-
tion of statistical significance (at 95% confidence) over the range
of Fox Density.
with Democratic incumbents who were more favorable to
the Democrats experienced a reverse effect of Fox News,
perceiving the Democratic incumbent as more electorally
secure with rising levels of Fox News. As anticipated, we
find that variation in Fox News density had no statistically
meaningful effect on the perceptions of Democratic PCs.
tricts were, on average, 20.3 percentage points less likely to
0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Fox Density
perceive the Democratic incumbent as likely to win when
treated with high doses of Fox News than those in the
control group. As before, Republican PCs in Democratic-
leaning districts were, conversely, more inclined to assess
the Democratic incumbent as likely to win with the Fox
News treatment. We again find that Fox News had no
statistically discernible effect on the perceptions of Demo-
cratic PCs.
We find substantively similar results when using a
dependent variable that instead captured PCs’ percep-
tions of the overall strength of the Republican Party
in the district. In short, Fox News induced perceptions
of greater Republican strength and, as shown above,
Democratic incumbent vulnerability among Republican
PCs when districts were increasingly favorable to the
STRATEGIC CANDIDATE ENTRY IN THE ERA OF FOX NEWS
Republicans, with no corresponding effect among Demo-
cratic PCs. Although these results could be a function of
mere changes in the response patterns of the PCs, this
possibility seems unlikely to us given that these results
map closely onto the real changes in behavior that we
observed in the House data.
Discussion
Elections give power to the people, but only if politi-
cal elites provide them with reasonable alternatives. In
the United States, politicians self-select into running for
office—as opposed to being placed on a list drawn up
by party leaders—which makes credible candidates more
cautious when deciding when and where to run. Because
PCs are attentive to the partisan dynamics of their po-
tential constituency and because congressional districts
often have a particular partisan slant, Americans do not
always have two “quality” candidates to choose from in
congressional elections. This is an unfortunate state of
affairs considering that quality challengers meaningfully
improve the competitiveness of congressional elections
(Jacobson and Kernell 1981). In this article, we tackled a
question central to the health of democracy and demo-
cratic accountability: How do national news media affect
credible candidates’ decision to run?
The answer to this question is rooted in perception.
When progressively ambitious quality candidates perceive
their chances of winning are high, they are more likely
to take on the risk of running for higher office. Percep-
tions are guesswork—they involve taking in the available
evidence and making an imperfect inference. Previous
research has shown that ambitious PCs are attentive to
shifts in electoral outcomes, economic preference, and
the presence of scandals. The central contribution of our
project is showing the role that the national news media
play in shaping PCs’ perceptions and, ultimately, strategic
decisions to run for Congress. Elected officials often treat
the news media as a gauge for public sentiment, and we
extrapolated that the same is true for PCs.
The challenge to studying the effects of national
news media coverage is that broadcast network coverage
reaches all congressional districts, offering little leverage
to study variance in the shifts in partisan advantages that
news coverage might create. For this reason, there has
been a heavy focus on how national media shape mass
attitudes, and researchers who have considered the effect
of media on congressional elections tend to focus on lo-
cal print media. Fortunately, we are able to circumvent
this problem in a way that provides valuable insights to
15
the literatures on media and congressional elections. We
do so by taking advantage of exogenous variation in the
ideological balance of national news coverage across con-
gressional districts introduced by the haphazard rollout of
the conservative cable news channel, Fox News. Although
Fox News penetration was not randomly assigned to con-
gressional districts, we uncovered compelling evidence
that variation in Fox News penetration in its early days
was “as-if random.” We further probed the robustness of
our findings and continued to find strong support for the
thesis that the introduction of Fox News had a measur-
able effect on congressional elections by altering the entry
calculus of quality PCs.
In particular, we found that Fox News increased the
likelihood that quality Republican challengers emerged in
districts that were tenuously held by Democratic incum-
bents. These results are consistent with our theoretical
model, which treated perceptions as a function of both di-
rect (e.g., previous election outcomes) and indirect (e.g.,
news coverage) forms of information. The introduction
of Fox News should have only moved quality Republican
PCs’ perceptions of winning over the threshold of indiffer-
ence to running for office in congressional districts where
the Democratic incumbent was vulnerable. Furthermore,
the effect size we find is both substantively meaningful for
reelection-minded incumbents and consistent with the
effect sizes observed by other studies examining similar
questions (e.g., DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007). Somewhat
surprisingly, we also find that Fox News reduced the like-
lihood that Democratic incumbents in secure districts
faced quality Republican challengers—a finding consis-
tent with recent work documenting the polarizing effect
of the partisan media (Levendusky 2013). In addition
to these patterns of observed entry behavior, we provide
evidence that Republican PCs experienced measurable
changes in their perceptions of Democratic incumbent
vulnerability. These findings suggest that at least part of
Fox News’s effect on entry behavior can be attributed to
changes in PCs’ expectations for electoral success. At the
same time, we find that even though some quality Repub-
lican PCs perceived that they had better chances of win-
ning and, thus, were more likely to challenge Democratic
incumbents, we find little evidence that Fox News actually
helped these Republican challengers beat Democratic in-
cumbents (see SI Appendix J). These findings square with
and contribute to recent work on legislative representa-
tion, which shows that, even in their attempt to be rational
actors, political elites are susceptible to perceptional biases
caused by overreliance on faulty heuristics (Broockman
and Skovron 2018; Hertel-Fernandez, Mildenberger, and
Stokes 2019)—in this case, naı̈vely equating shifts in news
media coverage to shifts in public opinion.
16
Beyond the specific goal of our research question, we
also see this study as contributing to our understanding
of partisan media and democratic representation more
generally. Scholars debate the degree to which partisan
news media broadcasts on cable directly influence politi-
cal outcomes (Arceneaux and Johnson 2013; Levendusky
2013). Despite the relatively small size of cable news audi-
ences (Webster 2014), scholars have uncovered evidence
that Fox News may have increased turnout among Repub-
licans (DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; Hopkins and Ladd
2014). Although these findings likely reflect the direct in-
fluence of Fox News on the voting public, our research
highlights that the Fox News effect in the analysis of elec-
tion outcomes may have also been the product of changes
in the strategic political choices of candidates. We identify
a mechanism—(i.e., the partisan news media) contribut-
ing to the perceptual biases that fundamentally inform
the decisions of ambitious potential candidates. Our evi-
dence shows that PCs, like elected politicians, use partisan
news media coverage to “sense the mood of the moment,
assess its trend, and anticipate its consequence for fu-
ture elections” (Stimson, MacKuen, and Erikson 1995,
545). Perceived changes in public opinion—accurate or
not—shape PCs’ beliefs about future election opportu-
nities and hazards. In turn, the entry decisions of strong
PCs can alter the behavior of incumbents, who strategi-
cally update their roll-call voting behavior in anticipation
of or in response to a challenge. Our evidence also con-
tributes to recent work documenting media effects on
political elites (e.g., Arceneaux et al. 2016; Clinton and
Enamorado 2014) and helps explain why Democrats in
marginal districts with Fox News appeared to move to
the right in the months before an election (Arceneaux
et al. 2016): Many of them faced strong challenges from
Republicans who Fox News helped coax off the sidelines.
We draw mixed normative implications from our
findings. In some sense, the emergence of Fox News fa-
cilitated democratic accountability by boosting electoral
competition in closely divided districts with Democratic
incumbents. In the absence of Fox News, voters in these
districts may not have had two viable alternatives due to
the scare-off effect of incumbency (Cox and Katz 1996;
Levitt and Wolfram 1997). That said, we recognize that
the partisan implications of Fox News–induced electoral
competition were asymmetrical. Voters living in similarly
situated districts with vulnerable Republican incumbents
did not get the same opportunity. Consequently, to the
extent that Fox News induced democratic accountabil-
ity, it did so in an unbalanced way. We see these trends
working to nudge the political system to the right.
We believe that our study opens multiple lines of
future research. Did Fox News draw more extreme can-
KEVIN ARCENEAUX ET AL.
didates into electoral politics by discouraging moderates
from running for office? Did Fox News change other cam-
paign dynamics, such as contributions and rhetoric? Fi-
nally, we have largely focused on state politicians who are
progressively ambitious, but we believe that it is equally
important for future research to understand whether the
emergence of partisan news media also influenced the
decisions that state legislators made in their chambers.
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Supporting Information
Additional supporting information may be found online
in the Supporting Information section at the end of the
article.
Appendix A: Deconstructing the p-Term
Appendix B: Providing a More Detailed Measure of Chal-
lenger Quality
Appendix C: Fixed Effects & Random Intercepts Specifi-
cations of Models
Appendix D: Alternative Covariate Specifications for
Quality Challenger Entry Models
Appendix E: Fox News Effects on Primary Stage
Appendix F: Accounting for Time Effects of Fox News
Appendix G: Placebo Test
Appendix H: Description of Our Sample of PCs
Appendix I: Balance of Perceptions Data Using Ge-
netic Matching
Appendix J: Examination of PC Perceptions