Shintaro Miura Spoke on 'Manipulated News Model: Electoral Competition and Mass Media'

On November 10 a research seminar on political economy took place at HSE. Shintaro Miura (Kanagawa University) presented the report on 'Manipulated News Model: Electoral Competition and Mass Media'.

Abstract:

This paper concerns the distortions in electoral outcomes when mass media strategically distorts the interactions between candidates and voters.  We develop an election model where a voter cannot directly observe the policies proposed by two office-motivated candidates.  The voter learns this information through media reports before voting takes place, while the media outlet strategically conceals some part of this information.  Because incorrect decision-making by the voter is unavoidable (direct distortion), the candidates have an incentive to inuence the media outlet's behavior through policy settings that are indirectly appealing to the voter (indirect distortion).  As a result, policy convergence never occurs if and only if the outlet is sufficiently biased.  We then measure the degree of distortion in the equilibrium outcomes by the voter's ex ante expected utility, and characterize the least and most distorted scenarios. This characterization shows that the distortion becomes severer as the outlet becomes more biased.   By decomposing total distortion into its components,  we also illustrate the tension arising between the direct and the indirect distortion.