Character Endorsements and Electoral Competition

Chakraborty, Archishman; Ghosh, Parikshit

doi:10.1257/mic.20140241

Cited by 18 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Prat (2002a, b) considers the signaling role of campaign spending; voters make inferences about candidate quality through their ability to raise funds. In Chakraborty and Ghosh (2013), candidates may adopt policies favored by the elite in order to gain endorsements.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Information and Extremism in Elections

Boleslavsky

Cotton

2015

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

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Information about political candidates emerges during campaigns through debates, media coverage, informative advertising, and observed performance on the campaign trail. To the extent that it enables voters to make better-informed election day decisions, campaign information is generally considered to be good for democracy. Our analysis questions this widely held view. We model an election in which parties nominate candidates with observable policy preferences prior to a campaign that produces information about candidate quality, a characteristic that is orthogonal to a candidate's policy platform. A more informative campaign reduces uncertainty about candidate quality, allowing voters to make better choices on election day.

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Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Information and Extremism in Elections

Boleslavsky

Cotton

2015

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics

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“…I show that this difference plays an important role when endogenizing the process of regulation. Finally, the welfare analysis in Chakraborty and Ghosh (2016) focuses on the ideological conflict between the media outlet and the voter, while I focus on the intensity of misreporting costs and its regulation.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…11 Quality can capture traits like candidates' fit with the state of the world and capability, or might consist of evidence of their virtues and misconducts. On the closely related notion of valence or character, see Stokes (1963), Kartik and McAfee (2007) and Chakraborty and Ghosh (2016), among others.…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influential News and Policy-making

Vaccari

2020

SSRN Journal

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To counter misinformation, regulators can exercise control over the costs that media outlets incur for misreporting policy-relevant news, e.g. by imposing fines. This paper analyzes the welfare implications of those type of interventions that affect misreporting costs. I study a model of strategic communication between an informed media outlet and an uninformed voter, where the outlet can misreport information at a cost. The alternatives available to the voter are endogenously championed by two competing candidates before communication takes place. I find that there is no clear nexus between the voter's welfare and informational distortions: interventions that benefit the voter might be associated with more misreporting activity and persuasion; relatively low misreporting costs yield full revelation, but minimize the voter's welfare because they induce large policy distortions. Interventions that increase misreporting costs never harm the voter, but lenient measures might be wasteful. Electoral incentives distort the process of regulation itself, resulting in sub-optimal interventions that are detrimental to the voter's welfare.

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“…There, the electorate's main problem is to control politicians. Overall, whether media outlets inform voters about candidates' platforms (Chan and Suen ; Miura ) or their character (Chakraborty and Ghosh ), biased media tends to generate polarized platforms as candidates distort their policy promises to appeal to biased news providers and gain positive coverage. This polarization, in turn, reduces the electorate's welfare.…”

Section: Related Formal Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy?

Wolton

2019

American J Political Sci

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This article assesses the normative and positive claims regarding the consequences of biased media using a political agency framework that includes a strategic voter, polarized politicians, and news providers. My model predicts that voters are always better informed with unbiased than with biased outlets even when the latter have opposite ideological preferences. However, biased media may improve voter welfare. Contrary to several scholars' fears, partisan news providers are not always bad for democracy. My theoretical findings also have important implications for empirical analyses of the electoral consequences of changes in the media environment. The impact of left-wing and right-wing biased outlets depends on the partisan identity of officeholders. Empirical findings may, thus, not be comparable across studies or even over time within a study. Existing empirical works are unlikely to measure the consequences of biased media, as researchers never observe and can rarely approximate the adequate counterfactual: elections with unbiased news outlets.

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Character Endorsements and Electoral Competition

Cited by 18 publications

References 46 publications

Information and Extremism in Elections

Information and Extremism in Elections

Influential News and Policy-making

Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy?

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