Simplistic Rhetoric and Poe’s Law

We study the use of simplistic arguments in political communication, developing a novel model of mobilization through rhetoric with naive and sophisticated voters. We show that politicians sometimes choose simplistic arguments in order to appear more competent, exploiting what we call Poe’s Law, that is, the uncertainty on whether the argument used by the politician reflects her own competence or is ‘degraded’ to meet the demand for simplistic arguments of the naive electorate. We compare the Bayes Nash game with a game in which sophisticated voters are unable to conceptualize Poe’s Law, dismissing their peers’ cognitive abilities and identifying with a leader that speaks to a fully naive crowd. The two games have opposed predictions on how expected simplism departs from its demand-driven benchmark, as well as on the interpretation of extreme arguments. Our results demonstrate that dismissal is a valid rationalization of an overly simplistic political debate.