📌 Natural Quasi-Experiment: The Sun Boycott After Hillsborough
A long-standing puzzle is whether powerful media outlets can shape public opinion when people self-select their news. A rare, exogenous event—the 30-year boycott of The Sun in Merseyside after the Hillsborough soccer disaster—creates leverage to answer that question. The boycott targeted the most important Eurosceptic tabloid in England and provides a quasi-experimental test of media effects on attitudes toward leaving the EU.
📊 How the Effect Was Identified and Measured
- The analysis treats the Merseyside boycott as a natural experiment that reduced exposure to The Sun.
- Difference-in-differences designs compare treated areas to comparable controls using public opinion data spanning three decades.
- Results are supplemented and validated with referendum returns from the 2016 EU referendum.
🔍 Key Findings
- The Sun boycott caused attitudes toward the EU to become more positive in treated areas (Merseyside) relative to controls.
- The effect is concentrated among cohorts socialized during the boycott period, indicating long-term generational socialization effects.
- The effect is also driven by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun, pointing to changes in media consumption as a key mechanism.
⚖️ Why It Matters
- Demonstrates that sustained reductions in exposure to a persuasive media source can shift public opinion on major policy questions.
- Highlights the role of socialization and class-based media habits in producing durable opinion change.
- Suggests practical routes for countering concentrated media influence in contemporary democracies by altering information environments and media access.
