Who Trusts Berlusconi? An Econometric Analysis of the Role of Television in the Political Arena

The objective of this paper is to improve our understanding on how the former Italian prime minister formed and kept his exceptional political consensus despite the never-ending series of scandals in which he has been involved. Specifically, we carry out an empirical assessment of the relationship between trust in television and trust towards the prime minister. Many Italian commentators argue that television does not exert any particular bias on public opinion. If the assumption of television's irrelevance were true, one could reasonably expect to find no significant relationship between trust in TV and trust in Mr Berlusconi as prime minister. Contrary to this hypothesis, our empirical analysis shows that trust in television was the strongest predictor of trust in the Italian prime minister in Spring 2011, thus suggesting that Mr Berlusconi's media empire played a key role in the building of his political consensus.