Television Time and Electoral Success: Evidence From the Constitutional Convention Election in Chile in 2021

Some democracies give all political parties free television time to level the electoral campaign playing field. Relying on a case that uses open-list proportional representation rules and where voters select individual candidates, but where free television time is assigned to party lists, we explore the association between appearing in free television ads (franja) and electoral success in Chile’s 2021 Constitutional Convention election. In this unprecedented contest, airtime was allocated to parties and lists of independents. We use an original coding of 3,157 mentions across 28 days of television ads for candidates in the four largest electoral lists (692 candidates). Candidates mentioned in ads received higher vote shares (2.9 vs. 2.2 percent) and were more likely to win seats (18.6 vs. 7.7 percent). Multivariate models show that campaign spending is more strongly associated with electoral success, but mentions in the franja have a modest but statistically significant positive coefficient. Although we cannot disentangle the potential endogeneity of being more electable and appearing in the franja, the findings highlight the importance of television time for electoral success and point to how party-controlled media exposure influences intra-list competition.