Controlling Collective Attention: Flooding versus Focusing by Politicians

Joshua Gans

No 33933, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper develops a formal model of strategic political communication when citizens have limited attention and heterogeneous inference procedures. A politician privately observes their quality across multiple policy dimensions and must allocate a fixed informational capacity between breadth (number of issues disclosed) and depth (signals per issue). Citizens attend to exactly one dimension and advocate for investigation only when sufficiently suspicious; an investigation is triggered only if enough citizens coordinate on the same issue. We show that high dimensionality with low depth—“flooding the zone”—maximises disagreement among citizens within the feasible (m, n) choices: those attending different issues see small samples and reach divergent conclusions. Politicians with unfavourable information optimally flood when accountability penalties are large, exploiting coordination failures to avoid scrutiny. A key comparative static shows that as accountability penalties rise, the bad type’s optimal breadth is weakly increasing and eventually reaches maximal breadth, exploiting coordination failures to reduce exposure risk. When the good type retains a more concentrated disclosure choice to preserve reputational performance and the possibility of vindication, the resulting equilibrium features action separation in disclosure breadth. The model also admits pooling equilibria in which both types flood and information is abundant but shallow (“transparency theatre”) under the corresponding incentive inequalities. Introducing a mixture of naïve and sophisticated citizens who interpret disclosure strategically changes reputational incentives; we show that equilibria supported by strict inequalities are locally robust to the fraction of sophisticated citizens and that average beliefs vary affinely with this fraction.

JEL-codes: C72 D72 D80 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-ict, nep-mic and nep-pol
Note: PR
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