We study a model of electoral accountability and selection (EAS) in which voters with heterogeneous horizontal preferences pay limited attention to the incumbent's performance using personalized news aggregators. Extreme voters' news aggregators exhibit an own-party bias, which hampers their abilities to discern good and bad performances. While this effect alone would undermine EAS, there is a countervailing effect stemming from the disagreement between extreme voters, which makes the centrist voter pivotal and could potentially improve EAS. Thus increasing mass polarization and shrinking attention spans have ambiguous effects on EAS, whereas nuanced regulations of news aggregators unambiguously improve EAS and voter welfare.
We study a model of electoral accountability and selection (EAS) in which voters with heterogeneous horizontal preferences pay limited attention to the incumbent's performance using personalized news aggregators. Extreme voters' aggregators exhibit an own-party bias, which hampers their abilities to discern good and bad performances. While this effect alone could undermine EAS, there is a countervailing effect stemming from partisan disagreements, which make the centrist voter pivotal and could potentially enhance EAS. Overall, increasing mass polarization and shrinking attention spans have ambiguous effects on EAS, whereas correlating voters' news signals unambiguously improves EAS and voter welfare.
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news
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would
could
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the disagreement between extreme voters, which makes
partisan disagreements, which make
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improve EAS. Thus
enhance EAS. Overall,
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nuanced regulations of news aggregators unambiguously improve
correlating voters' news signals unambiguously improves