Does informative media commentary reduce politicians' incentives to pander?

Elections sometimes give policy-makers incentives to pander, i.e., to implement a policy that voters think is in their best interest, even though the policy-maker knows that a different policy is actually better for the voter. Pandering incentives are typically attenuated when voters learn, prior to the election, whether the policy chosen by the incumbent truly was in their best interest. This suggests that the media can improve accountability by reporting to voters information about whether an incumbent made good policy choices. We show that, although media monitoring does sometimes eliminate the incumbent’s incentive to pander, in other cases it makes the problem of pandering worse. Furthermore, in some circumstances incumbent incentives are better when the media acts as a “yes man” – suppressing some information that indicates the policy-maker made the wrong choice. We explain these seemingly paradoxical results by focusing on how media commentary affects voters’ tendency to apply an asymmetric burden of proof to the incumbent, based on whether she pursues popular or unpopular policies. I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. Thomas Jefferson, 1787 letter to Edward Carrington An active media is often thought to be essential to a well-functioning democracy. When politicians are accountable to voters, the people must be well-informed, lest the government respond to mistaken voter impulses. Newspapers, then, ensure that “the opinion of the people” is kept right by educating citizens about the merits of particular policy choices, and, the argument goes, enhance electoral accountability. We analyze this Jeffersonian intuition in a formal model of political accountability. Voters in the model are sometimes misinformed about their true interests. The incumbent policy maker has better information about optimal policy choices, and may thus have an incentive to pander – to implement a policy that voters believe is in their best interest, even though the policy maker’s superior information indicates the voters are wrong (Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts 2001; Maskin and Tirole 2004; Prat 2005). We start with a baseline model without a media, and then develop two variants of the model with a media outlet (“the newspaper”). In each variant, the newspaper gets private information about which policy best serves voters’ interests, and it acts as a commentator, making statements about which policy choice is correct. The model variants differ only in the timing of the newspaper’s commentary. In the first, simultaneous, variant, the newspaper comments at the same time that the incumbent chooses policy. In the second, sequential, variant the newspaper gets to observe the policy choice before commenting; this timing allows the newspaper, in the event that it sees a weak signal indicating that the incumbent chose the wrong policy, to act as a yes man, herding on the incumbent’s choice (Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch 1992; Sharfstein and Stein 1990).1 In both variants, the newspaper comments before the next election and is thus relevant for voters’ decision to retain or replace the incumbent, creating the prospect that media commentary might discipline an electorally motivated incumbent’s policy choice. Our key question is: How does the presence of the newspaper affect the incumbent politician’s incentives to pander?2 Building on Jefferson’s intuition, you might think that, because the media gives voters information about whether the incumbent acted in their best interest, politicians will have less incentive to pander in the presence of a media. After all, if, at the time of the next election, voters will be perfectly informed about whether the incumbent’s policy choice promoted their interests, then the incumbent has no incentive to pander (Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts 2001). So a reasonable conjecture is that an informative, though sometimes mistaken, media will improve accountability by reducing pandering. Both the simultaneous and sequential variants of our model partially confirm this Jeffersonian intuition; in some circumstances, introducing a media commentator eliminates pandering. But the media does not always eliminate pandering; introducing a media can in fact lead to pandering when Although the details of imitation in our model differ from those in Pendergast (1993), the underlying intuition of conformity is similar. Prat (2005) shows that pandering incentives can be reduced if voters do not learn the incumbent’s action choice. Besley and Prat (2006) analyze whether the media can discipline kleptocratic government officials. Egorov, Guriev, and Sonin (2007) analyze tradeoffs faced by an autocrat who can use a free media to acquire information about bureaucrats’ performance, but who worries the media might instigate a revolution by informing voters that he himself has performed