Introducing media in a model of electoral competition with candidate quality

Abstract

This work proposes and studies a two candidate model of electoral competition with candidate quality and media. The role of media is to inform voters about the quality of each candidate. We assume that there are two non-strategic media outlets, each one with a different ideal policy (there is a leftist media outlet and a rightist one), and that both of them transmit lower quality for a candidate the further from their ideal policy the policy the candidate proposes is. We also assume that the rightist media outlet has greater coverage, in the sense that it informs neutral voters and voters slightly on the left side of the political spectrum. We study the model under the classical assumption of risk-averse voters. Classical results concerning PSNE generally hold with a "media bias". We extend and characterize in our setting the MSNE found in Aragonés and Xefteris (2012), which sometimes fails to exist in our model.