The Politics of Attention

Résumé

We develop an equilibrium theory of attention and politics. In a spatialmodel of electoral competition where candidates have varying policy prefer-ences, we examine what kinds of political behaviors capture voter’s limitedattention and how this concern in turn affects political outcomes. Followingthe seminal work of Downs (1957), we assume that voters are rationally inat-tentive and can process information about candidates’ random policies at acost proportional to entropy reduction as in Sims (1998) and Sims (2003). Twosalient patterns emerge in equilibrium as we increase the attention cost or garblethe news technology: first, arousing and attracting voter’s attention becomesharder; second, doing so leads the varying types of the candidates to adopt ex-treme and exaggerated policy and issue positions. We supplement our analysiswith historical accounts, and discuss its relevance in the new era featured withgreater media choices and distractions, as well as the rise of partisan media andfake news.∗Research School of Finance, Actuarial Studies and Statistics, Australian National University.lin.hu@anu.edu.au.†Department of Economics, Washington University in St. Louis. anqili@wustl.edu. We thankSteve Callander, Matt Gentzkow, Kun Li, Ilya Segal, Chris Shannon, Ken Shotts, as well as the sem-inar audience at APEN 2018, Columbia, UC Davis, University of Konstanz, University of Warwickand University of Zurich for comments and suggestions. All errors are our own.1