The Spin Doctor Meets the Rational Voter: Electoral Competition with Agenda-Setting Effects

Puglisi, Riccardo

doi:10.2139/ssrn.581881

Cited by 15 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…By comparison, less than 0.5% of respondents mentioned in ‡ation, and even counting generously, only about 1.5% of respondents mentioned trade issues (only 0.33% of respondents mentioned the trade de…cit speci…cally, and more respondents mentioned "international competitiveness" or "outsourcing", which might be treated more appropriately as employment issues). 26 As mentioned in the introduction, we only study agenda-setting and do not attempt to estimate any framing of economic events done through tone. Another limitation of our approach is that we simply count the number of articles featuring the chosen keywords.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The reason is that it is di¢ cult for consumers to distinguish the scenario "I did not see any news about X today because nothing important happened regarding X" from the scenario "I did not see any news about X today because, although something important happened, the media decided not to publish it". Theoretical models by Anderson and McLaren [2005], Bernhardt, Krasa and Polborn [2006], Besley and Prat [2006] and Puglisi [2004] incorporate precisely this source of media bias, and show how this can a¤ect public decisions and possibly lead to suboptimal ones.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers

Larcinese

Puglisi

Snyder

2011

Journal of Public Economics

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236

110

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seminar participants at Bristol, Cambridge, Columbia, Durham, Rome (Ente Einaudi), LSE, MIT, Milan, Suffolk, the World Meeting of the Public Choice Societies (Amsterdam) for helpful comments. We also give a very special thanks to Michael Naber for making the data collection possible. AbstractWe study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers

Larcinese

Puglisi

Snyder

2011

Journal of Public Economics

Self Cite

236

110

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The central issue is how effective 3 This type of trade-off is also studied in a signalling model by Besley and Smart (2007). 4 Empirical studies on mass media and policies include Besley and Burgess (2002), Strömberg (2004), Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010), Larcinese et al (2011), Puglisi andStrömberg (2010), Durante and Knight (2012) and Puglisi (2011). 5 Another important issue that is assumed away in this paper is media competition.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The following informational setup is close to Puglisi (2004). 29 In this formulation, η = 0 corresponds to no media bias in the model with soft information if α < 1/2.…”

Section: Partial Verifiabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Accountability, Electoral Control and Media Bias

Adachi

Hizen

2013

Japanese Economic Review

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Are anti‐establishment mass media really useful in preventing politicians from behaving dishonestly? This paper models the direction of media bias, and shows that the probability of a dishonest action by an incumbent is higher (than that in the case of no media bias) if and only if the mass media have some degree of “anti‐incumbent” bias (i.e. information favourable to the incumbent is converted into unfavourable news about the incumbent with a positive probability), provided that the incumbent is less likely to be opportunistic than a challenger in the upcoming election. This result holds irrespective of the degree of “pro‐incumbent” bias.

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“…11. Puglisi (2004) also assumes that all reports are verifiable, but the media outlet's actions are determined by spin exerted by an incumbent politician.…”

Section: Exogenous Slantmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Spatial Theory of Media Slant and Voter Choice

Duggan

Martinelli²

2011

The Review of Economic Studies

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We develop a theory of media slant as a systematic filtering of political news that reduces multidimensional politics to the one-dimensional space perceived by voters. Economic and political choices are interdependent in our theory: expected electoral results influence economic choices, and economic choices in turn influence voting behavior. In a two-candidate election, we show that media favoring the frontrunner will focus on issues unlikely to deliver a surprise, while media favoring the underdog will gamble for resurrection. We characterize the socially optimal slant and show it coincides with the one favored by the underdog under a variety of circumstances. Balanced media, giving each issue equal coverage, may be worse for voters than partisan media. 1. "The space in which political parties compete can be of highly variable structure. Just as the parties may be perceived and evaluated on several dimensions, so the dimensions that are salient to 4. As discussed later on, this result can be nicely contrasted with the "issue ownership" view of Petrocik (1996) and others.

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The Spin Doctor Meets the Rational Voter: Electoral Competition with Agenda-Setting Effects

Cited by 15 publications

References 31 publications

Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers

Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers

Political Accountability, Electoral Control and Media Bias

A Spatial Theory of Media Slant and Voter Choice

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