-------- DATE:  ------------------------------------------------------------- 12:00pm to 2:00pm -------- LOCATION:  --------------------------------------------------------- K354 Presentations given by Pamela Ban, Jim Snyder, and Andrew Hall First, Pamela Ban will conduct a brainstorming session for her paper (joint with Andrew Hall and Jim Snyder) \'How Newspapers Reveal Political Power,\' with Becca Goldstein as discussant. Second, Raphael Bruce will present his paper \'Mandatory Voting and Political Interest in Brazil,\' with Prof. Thomas Fujiwara as discussant.  *Abstract for \'How Newspapers Reveal Political Power\'* Power is difficult to measure. We propose using press coverage -- the relative amount of space devoted to different political actors -- to measure the relative power of these actors. The logic is straightforward. Newspapers will cover an actor or group more if that actor has more power. Actors or collective groups with more power generate newsworthy events when they try to exercise their power, when they send signals that they might exercise their power, or even when they simply meet to discuss the use of their power. We first check whether the general idea \'works\' for cases where power can be measured in alternative ways as well, studying the relative press coverage of different congressional committees, the relative coverage of mayors when they lose power after their cities adopt the council-manager form of government, and the relative coverage of congressional leaders vs. rank-and-file. Our goal is to apply the idea to measure power in a \'difficult\' case -- state and local political party organizations. We generate scores for each state and year, and aim to examine the correlations between the scores and institutional features of the political system that scholars argue should affect party strength -- e.g. secret ballot laws, direct primary elections, and civil service reforms. *Abstract for \'Mandatory Voting and Political Interest in Brazil\'* This paper presents empirical evidence on the effects of mandatory voting laws on political interest and media consumption. In Brazil, the law determines that every literate citizen over the age of eighteen at the day of the election is subject to an abstention cost. This provides us a natural experiment which allows us to identify the causal effect of mandatory voting on outcomes related to the level of political interest and information acquisition. Using national survey data on the consumption of media we find that the mandatory voting law has a significant positive impact on the interest on obtaining news about the government, and that this increase is driven mostly by the interest in obtaining information on local politics. We also find that the compulsory voting law shifts voters opinion about the incumbent party at the federal government towards a more favorable one. General media consumption is not affected but, for specific media outlets owned by the federal government, a causal impact is found.  subscribe [1] iCal [2] [1] webcal://www.iq.harvard.edu/calendar/export.ics/279041 [2] http://www.iq.harvard.edu/calendar/export.ics/279041