We investigate how access to local government information affects turnout in municipal elections. We hypothesize that the availability of news focused on local public affairs in an individual’s municipality affects her political participation.We anticipate that turnout will be depressed by restricted access to local government news. We test this expectation using survey data from the Los Angeles (California) Designated Market Area (DMA) collected by the Public Policy Institute of California, and the availability of weekly and daily newspapers in municipalities surrounding Los Angeles. We find that absent local news, voters are less likely to turnout. We examine reasons for this and discuss future research to investigate the influence of local news on voting.
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