Author
Abstract
Politicians are sometimes accused of sending “red herrings”, irrelevant information meant to distract their audience from other information. When do they succeed in fooling voters? How is this affected by the media? This paper proposes a model of election with red herring. An incumbent running for re-election may send an irrelevant ”tale” to distract voters from a scandal. Some politicians may simply enjoy telling irrelevant tales, making it difficult for voters to recognize red herrings. Red herrings can thus be ”successful” in that the incumbent is re-elected despite the scandal. Equilibrium characterization sheds light on two non-trivial results. First, the game sometimes has multiple equilibria: society may coordinate on equilibria with no or some successful red herring through a self-fulfilling social norm of tale-telling. However, high media attention to tales may discipline scandal-free politicians due to voter suspicion of tales, leaving a unique equilibrium with no successful red herring. A dynamic extension introduces feedbacks between the pool of politicians and media attention. Polar cases in which red herring is predicted to increase over time or on the contrary disappear are highlighted. A second extension shows that voter polarization is predicted to have ambiguous effects on politician discipline and thereby on screening.
Suggested Citation
Margot Belguise, 2023.
"Red herrings: A theory of bad politicians hijacking media attention,"
Discussion Papers
2023-12, Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP).
Handle:
RePEc:not:notnic:2023-12
Download full text from publisher
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:not:notnic:2023-12. 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: Hilary Hughes (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nicepuk.html .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.