Political Accountability and Misinformation

Braz Camargo (), Laura Karpuska and Caio Lorecchio ()
Additional contact information
Braz Camargo: Sao Paulo School of Economics - FGV
Caio Lorecchio: Universitat de Barcelona - BEAT

No 2023/460, UB School of Economics Working Papers from University of Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: What are the impacts of misinformation on political accountability? We address this question in a political career concerns framework with belief misspecification. In our model, an incumbent politician of an unknown ability seeks to maximize reelection chances by putting costly effort into the provision of a public good. Citizens agree ex-ante on how to interpret the outcomes of the incumbent's effort. However, some of them disagree on how to interpret other signals. Specifically, some voters incorrectly believe that a confounding signal is informative about the incumbent's ability, while others correctly understand that they are completely uninformative. This misspecification on this signal leads to ex-post disagreement on how successful the incumbent should be in providing the public good to secure a reelection. We consider both an intensive margin and an extensive margin of informational disagreement, that is, (i) how much the beliefs of citizens with learning misspecification differ from the beliefs of citizens with a correct learning model, and (ii) how much misspecified citizens represent in the composition of society. We characterize the impact of informational disagreement on effective accountability (the effort provided by the incumbent in equilibrium). Our analysis not only identifies situations in which misinformation impacts negatively the social contributions of elected governments, but also – perhaps counter-intuitively, situations in which misinformation increases political accountability.

Keywords: Political accountability; information; model misspecification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2445/205060 (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:ewp:wpaper:460web

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UB School of Economics Working Papers from University of Barcelona School of Economics Av. Diagonal 690, 08034 Barcelona. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by University of Barcelona School of Economics ().