 Issue selection, media competition, and polarization of salienceYohei Yamaguchi Games and Economic Behavior, 2022, vol. 136, issue C, 197-225 Abstract: In a political competition, political parties run their campaign communications to attract voters' attention to issues in which the parties have an advantage. Investigating how parties' issue selection strategy affects issue salience is crucial, considering the media outlets' behavior, as most voters receive political communication from parties through media reporting. In this study, I develop an issue selection model that incorporates the profit-maximization behavior of media outlets. First, I find that the issue coverage of media outlets diverges even when they do not have ideological preferences. Second, competition among media outlets and the strategic issue selection of parties lead to polarization in voters' issue salience weights. Finally, I show that this polarization increases the vote share of the party with lower-quality policy proposals. The results could be essential to understanding the relationship between issue salience, media, and their effect on electoral competition. Keywords: Electoral competition; Political campaign; Priming; Media bias (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:136:y:2022:i:c:p:197-225 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.09.004 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.