IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/amposc/v63y2019i3p548-562.html

Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy?

Author

Listed:
  • Stephane Wolton

Abstract

This article assesses the normative and positive claims regarding the consequences of biased media using a political agency framework that includes a strategic voter, polarized politicians, and news providers. My model predicts that voters are always better informed with unbiased than with biased outlets even when the latter have opposite ideological preferences. However, biased media may improve voter welfare. Contrary to several scholars' fears, 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. The impact of left‐wing and right‐wing biased outlets depends on the partisan identity of officeholders. Empirical findings may, thus, not be comparable across studies or even over time within a study. Existing empirical works 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephane Wolton, 2019. "Are Biased Media Bad for Democracy?," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 63(3), pages 548-562, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:63:y:2019:i:3:p:548-562
    DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12424
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12424
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/ajps.12424?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Grossman, Gene M. & Helpman, Elhanan, 2023. "Electoral competition with fake news," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    2. 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.
    3. repec:osf:socarx:r7w4m_v1 is not listed on IDEAS
    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. Blumenthal, Benjamin, 2022. "Voter Information and Distributive Politics," SocArXiv r7w4m, Center for Open Science.
    7. Luo, Zhaotian & Rozenas, Arturas, 2025. "Lying in persuasion," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 93-112.
    8. Devdariani, Saba & Hirsch, Alexander V., 2023. "Voter attention and electoral accountability," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 224(C).

    More about this item

    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

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:amposc:v:63:y:2019:i:3:p:548-562. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://doi.org/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5907 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.