Red herrings: A model of attention-hijacking by politicians

Margot Belguise

No 2024-01, Discussion Papers from Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP)

Abstract: Politicians often use “red herrings” to distract voters from scandals. When do such red herrings succeed? I develop a model in which an incumbent runs for re-election and potentially faces a scandal. Some incumbents enjoy telling “tales” (attention-grabbing stories) while others use tales to distract voters from the scandal. Multiple equilibria can arise: one with a norm of tale-telling in which red herrings succeed and another with a norm against tale-telling in which they fail. Increased media attention to tales has a non-monotonic effect, facilitating red herrings at low attention levels, but serving a disciplinary function at high levels.

Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-inv, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/nicep ... ers/2024/2024-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:not:notnic:2024-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP) School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hilary Hughes ().