CHARACTER ENDORSEMENTS AND ELECTORAL COMPETITION

Archishman Chakraborty and Parikshit Ghosh

No 234, Working papers from Centre for Development Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract: We present a model in which the media endorses the character of office-seeking candidates as a means to promote its own ideological agenda. In equilibrium, political parties completely pander to the elite-controlled media under moderate ideological conflict between voters and the elite. Larger ideological conflict leads to stochastic polarization-parties either adopt the role of media darlings or run highly populist campaigns. The analysis yields three critical welfare results:(a) delegation of message strategy by the media owner to a more moderate editor leads to a Pareto improvement (b) the median voter is never better o¤ delegating choice of candidates to the informed elite, i.e., democracy has instrumental value even when voters are uninformed (c) even with optimal editorial delegation, the media may be a net harm to a majority of voters, i.e., they may be better of if the informed elite did not exist.

Keywords: character endorsements; electoral competition; media bias; polarization; cheap talk; delegation; immiserizing information. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Journal Article: Character Endorsements and Electoral Competition (2016)
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