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Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy?

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  • Wolton, Stephane

Abstract

This paper assesses the normative and positive claims regarding the consequences of biased media using a political agency framework with a strategic voter, polarized politicians, and news providers. My model predicts that voters are always better informed with unbiased than biased outlets even when the latter have opposite ideological preferences. However, biased media may improve voter welfare. Contrary to several scholars' fear, partisan news providers are not always bad for democracy. My theoretical findings also have important implications for empirical analyses of the electoral consequences of changes in the media environment. Left-wing and right-wing biased outlets have heterogeneous effects on electoral outcomes which need to be properly accounted for. Existing empirical studies are unlikely to measure the consequences of biased media as researchers never observe and can rarely approximate the adequate counterfactual: elections with unbiased news outlets.

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  • Wolton, Stephane, 2017. "Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy?," MPRA Paper 84837, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:84837
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    Cited by:

    1. Grossman, Gene M. & Helpman, Elhanan, 2023. "Electoral competition with fake news," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    2. Blumenthal, Benjamin, 2022. "Voter Information and Distributive Politics," SocArXiv r7w4m, Center for Open Science.
    3. Izzo, Federica & Dewan, Torun & Wolton, Stephane, 2022. "Cumulative knowledge in the social sciences: The case of improving voters' information," MPRA Paper 112559, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. Anqi Li & Lin Hu, 2020. "Electoral Accountability and Selection with Personalized Information Aggregation," Papers 2009.03761, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.
    5. Li, Anqi & Hu, Lin, 2023. "Electoral accountability and selection with personalized information aggregation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 140(C), pages 296-315.
    6. Devdariani, Saba & Hirsch, Alexander V., 2023. "Voter attention and electoral accountability," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 224(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    biased news; counterfactual; welfare; information;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy Formulation and Implementation
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

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