All of this changed when Silvio Berlusconi, one of Italy’s richest entrepreneurs, started buying up regional channels in the 1980s. Though Italian courts repeatedly declared his activities illegal, Berlusconi’s close connections to leading politicians allowed him to build Italy’s first private network, Mediaset.

The difference between RAI and Mediaset was about as big as that between American networks of the 1960s and the cable shows of the 2010s. Less than 10 percent of Mediaset’s content consisted of news or educational programming. Whereas RAI devoted hours to earnest politicians and professors debating the most pressing issues of the day, Berlusconi’s channels homed in on the lowest common denominator. On one of Mediaset’s most infamous shows, a model would take off a piece of clothing every time a contestant answered a question correctly or had a lucky turn at the roulette wheel; when she was (nearly) naked, he won.

Gradual introduction of Berlusconi’s networks into different regions of Italy makes it possible to study the effect that entertainment television had on voting behavior. For example, Durante, Pinotti, and Tesei found that parts of Italy that had earlier access to Mediaset were substantially more likely to vote for Forza Italia, Berlusconi’s new political party, in 1994, when it first entered the political scene.

The effect persisted throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with regions that were exposed to Mediaset earlier than others voting for Berlusconi in greater numbers. To verify that Mediaset was the relevant factor, the authors compared towns and villages that were able to get good reception with neighboring ones that initially had a poor signal due to physical obstacles, such as a mountain range. Amazingly, Italians who had good access to Mediaset for random geographical reasons voted for populists in greater numbers than their neighbors who did not.

Among older Italians, the authors of the study argue, “the larger support for Forza Italia could be attributed to their exposure to the markedly pro-Berlusconi bias of Mediaset newscasts.” The earlier they had been exposed to Mediaset, the more they watched, the more easily they were manipulated when Mediaset anchors sang Berlusconi’s praises. Simple enough.

What about younger Italians? According to the authors, regular consumers of entertainment television preferred Berlusconi because they had poor cognitive skills. That sounds like a dumb Ivy League joke—but the study did find that Italians who watched a lot of Mediaset before the age of 10 performed worse on a series of numeracy and literacy tests. And the more exposure conscripts to Italy’s army had to entertainment television, the more likely they were to be exempted from military service because they had failed to meet its minimum intelligence requirements.