Government advertising as hidden political funding
A theoretical and empirical analysis of the case of Argentina
Abstract
This work hopes to lay the theoretical groundwork for the hypothesis that government advertising can be ‒and is‒ used as an electioneering tool in favor of incumbents, that is, those currently heading the Executive Branch. To achieve this, we will present a bibliographical discussion of the causes, contexts, and mechanisms involved in this strategy, and then analyze the example of Argentina. We will offer empirical data showing the exponential growth, even adjusting for inflation, of government advertising spending between 2000 and 2014, and its unequal distribution across different newspapers.
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