Cross-border media and nationalism: Evidence from Serbian radio in Croatia

This paper through a lab experiment tries to answer the query that how does nationalistic media
impact animosity and hatred between ethnic groups speaking same language and following same
religion, though from different sects by observing Serbian radio broadcasts in Croatia.
Substantial literature takes into account the importance of differences in income and resources,
political institutions, aid, and the history of relationships between ethnic groups, among other
factors. The two main questions of this paper are: Do Croats actually listen to Serbian ratio when
it is available? If so, does Serbian radio have any effect on nationalistic political views and
attitudes towards Serbs?

Availability of Serbian radio is measured through hand collected on actual availability of radio in
139 villages located in the vicinity of Serbia and secondly, signal strength of Serbian radios
using information on Serbian transmitters and the topography of the region for all 417 villages in
Croatia within 75 kilometers of the Croatian-Serbian border is computed. For the first question,
78 % Croatian respondents said that they listened to Serbia. And their exposure to Serbian radio
lead to increased votes for extreme nationlist parties in 2007 Parliamentary elections.

The research has been conducted in the background of Yugoslav war by mainly focusing on
Serbian-Croatian conflict. Serbs are Orthdox while Croats are Catholics. The four media types
considered for this study are: Croatian television, Croatian print media, Croatian radio and
Serbian radio. The two major Croatian political parties are Croatian Democratic Union and the
Social Democratic Party of Croatia have opposite views. The former follows a moderate
nationalist pro-Croatian ideology while the latter maintains a neutral position towards Serbia. In
this context, the research also gathered data on ethnically offensive graffiti like ‘Kill a Serb’ or
‘Hang a Serb on a window’ and out of 136 villages, 36 had such graffiti.

The survey findings overall indicate that a significant share of Croatian population listens to
Serbian radio. Other than for politics, Croatians also listen to Serb radio because they have a
preference for Serb music. It was also evident that certain type of Serbian radio has inflammatory
content for Croats, and for this, an experiment in a university was conducted in which Croatian
students were exposed to different remixes of news and music from the radio programs typically
broadcast in the region. The experimental findings suggest that even a short exposure to the type
of content featured in the Serbian RTS radio (such as the song devoted to a Serbian alleged war
criminal) affects attitudes towards Serbs in the direction of increased anti-Serbian sentiment. The
econometric regression shows that for measuring the determinants of radio availability, only
education has a statistically significant effect on measured reception of Serbian radio in the
border-area villages. And the signal strength of Serbian radio is significantly related to several
control variables like distance, population and number of individuals disabld during the war. The
experiment shows that the availability of Serbian radio increases the vote share for the extreme
nationalist parties by 2.6 percentage points relative to a baseline vote share of 7 percentage
points, a statistically and economically significant effect. A key concern is that the availability of
Serbian radio could proxy for (unobservable) confounding variables that are positively correlated
with nationalistic sentiment and hence bias upward the correlation between radio availability and
nationalistic vote share. The paper also calculates persuasion rate. ‘Persuasion rate’ is the
fraction of the audience of a media outlet who are convinced to change their vote after being
exposed to a media outlet. To compute persuasion rates, one needs an estimate of the share of
individuals listening to the Serbian radio in treatment group(villages with Serb radio) and in the
control group(villages without Serb radio). The persuasion rate calculated is 4.3%.

Following are the measures done for robustness check:

The results are essentially identical if we: (i) consider only the vote for the main nationalistic
party HSP as dependent variable; (ii) control for the intensity of past conflict by introducing a
control for the location of the Serbian Krajina; (iii) control for the distance to the transmitters and
for elevation; (iv) control for the vulnerability to potential Serbian attacks using driving time to
Serbia and the number of conflict events within 3 km of each village according to Armed
Conflict Location and Event Dataset; (v) estimate the results with a nearest-neighbor matching
estimator, where we compute the average treatment on the treated by finding the 5 control
villages which are the closest to each of the treated villages; (vi) include all villages within a 35
km. range from the border.

We find that the exposure to the Serbian public radio convinces some Croats to switch to voting
for ultra-nationalist parties from voting to moderate nationalist party. In addition, exposure to
Serbian public radio increases the incidence of ethnically-offensive graffiti on public buildings in
the center of their villages. This all indicates that media can have substantial cross-group effects
in areas characterized by ethnic tensions with overlapping media markets and groups sharing
similar languages. This suggests that peaceful relations between neighboring ethnic and religious
groups depend in part on the content of media programming, and the extent of media overlap.