Aakaash Rao (Alesina Seminar)

Speaker & Title

Aakaash Rao (Harvard), "What Drives Political Attention?" (with Shakked Noy, MIT)

Abstract

We show that US politicians' campaign advertisements focus on economic issues such as jobs and taxes, while political news coverage prioritizes cultural issues such as guns, abortion, race, and gender. We explain this difference in part through a difference in objectives: politicians maximize their vote margin over their competitor, whereas news outlets maximize their audience size. Linking campaign ads with voting decisions and high-frequency variation in TV news content with household-level viewership responses, we show that economic content better rewards a margin-maximizer because it disproportionately "poaches" people who would otherwise choose competing politicians or news channels, while cultural content better rewards a size-maximizer because it disproportionately "mobilizes" people who would otherwise not vote or view news. The media's incentive to center cultural conflict influences politics: constituencies exogenously more exposed to cable news weigh cultural issues more heavily when voting, and local politicians respond by supplying more culturally-focused ads. Estimating a joint model of media choice and political competition, we show that the entry of cable news channels in the 1990s can explain 40% of the subsequent increase in cultural polarization.

Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.

All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.