Electoral accountability and selection with personalized information aggregationAnqi Li and Lin Hu Games and Economic Behavior, 2023, vol. 140, issue C, 296-315 Abstract: We study a model of electoral accountability and selection whereby heterogeneous voters aggregate incumbent politician's performance data into personalized signals through paying limited attention. Extreme voters' signals exhibit an own-party bias, which hampers their ability to discern the good and bad performances of the incumbent. While this effect alone would undermine electoral accountability and selection, there is a countervailing effect stemming from partisan disagreement, which makes the centrist voter more likely to be pivotal. In case the latter's unbiased signal is very informative about the incumbent's performance, the combined effect on electoral accountability and selection can actually be a positive one. For this reason, factors carrying a negative connotation in every political discourse—such as increasing mass polarization and shrinking attention span—could have ambiguous accountability and selection effects. Correlating voters' signals, if done appropriately, unambiguously improves electoral accountability and selection and voter welfare. Keywords: Rational inattention; Personalized information aggregation; Electoral accountability and selection (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:140:y:2023:i:c:p:296-315 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2023.04.001 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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