When the light shines too much: Rational inattention and pandering

Abstract

Should voters always pay attention to politics? I explore the role of endogenous costly attention allocation in politics, combining insights from the growing literature on rational inattention with a standard model of political agency. I show that when attention to the action of the politician is endogenous, voters may choose to pay too much attention in equilibrium, and this induces too much political pandering. Moreover when attention to the action and to the state of the world are both endogenous, voters may not pay enough attention the state with respect to the ex ante optimum. A reduction in the total cost of attention does not correct this inefficiency and can even reduce welfare. This model can be a demand-driven explanation of the under-provision of analytical contents by news channels.

Political Agency and Implementation Subsidies with Imperfect Monitoring

“…In contrast with Matejka and Tabellini (2021) which focuses on a political competition setting with probabilistic voting and considers the incentives of groups of voters with heterogeneous preferences to acquire more precise information about policies offered by candidates, I consider a two-period political agency model with moral hazard and adverse selection, with no differences of interests between voters (hence the use of a representative voter framework). This makes my work closer to the papers of Prato and Wolton (2016), Prato and Wolton (2018), Trombetta (2020), and Devdariani and Hirsch (2021). The former two consider models of electoral competition with a representative voter, whilst the latter two focus on political agency models of pandering with a representative voter.…”

Voter attention and electoral accountability

“…Finally, with respect to implications about voter welfare the model adds to a small but growing literature that identifies reasons why improving voters informational environmenteither by improving the accuracy of information sources or by lowering the costs to voters of acquiring political information -may be a double edged sword for both politicians and voters (e.g. Trombetta (2020)). In our model, both may be harmed by such improvements if they do not overcome, or even exacerbate, the propensity of rational voters to apply different levels of scrutiny to different policy choices.…”

“…The only work of which we are aware that considers endogenous information acquisition by the voter in an electoral accountability setting is Trombetta (2020). In that model, incumbents are differentiated by their preferences rather than their abilities.…”

“…They have also examined how the accountability relationship is influenced by information provided through strategic third-parties such as unbiased or biased media outlets (Ashworth and Shotts 2010, Warren 2012, Wolton 2019, Li, Hu and Segal 2020 and democratic challengers (Demirkaya 2019). However, with the exception of Trombetta (2020), existing models of political accountability assume -either implicitly or explicitly -that once information is made available to the voters, it is "free" for them to collect, interpret, and incorporate into their decisionmaking.…”

Voter Information and Distributive Politics

“…Third, the paper contributes to the literature on information and transparency in policymaking. Prat (2005), Fox (2007), Fox and Van Weelden (2012), Fu and Li (2014), Prato and Wolton (2016), Prato and Wolton (2018), and Trombetta (2020 consider agency relationships between a principal and an agent and discuss the costs and benefits of transparency over actions. Since I consider a political agency model with multiple principals, a closely related paper is Lohmann (1998), which features heterogeneity in politicians' abilities and heterogeneously informed voters and shows how these, coupled with heterogeneous voters preferences, lead to benefits for more informed voters.…”