Electoral competition with lying, inattention and targeted narratives

I intend to combine applied theory and empirics to contribute to a better understanding of the prevalence and popularity of different political discourses. In particular, I am interested in the phenomenon of post-truth politics and political polarization.

I am currently working on a model of electoral competition with inattention and third-party fact-checking. In my model, candidates compete for voters' limited attention, strategically choosing campaign messages and airtime allocation. Inattention makes voters receptive to lies as fact-checking messages may be crowded out. I intend to carry out both a positive and normative analysis, studying the expected aggregate welfare cost of voter inattention.
The political economy literature has recently started expanding upon canonical electoral competition models by incorporating behavioural insights to voters' perception of candidates. My model distinguishes itself from this work in two main aspects.
First, rational inattention models in which voters optimally allocate their attention cannot explain why candidates sometimes dedicate a large airtime to topics of limited interest to voters. Building on empirical evidence on the role of salient stimuli in capturing attention, I thus assume that voters are more likely to remember more prominent messages - taking the remembered messages at face value and using their prior to complete missing information.
Second, those models have focused on policy choice, assuming that candidates commit to platforms, and therefore not leaving any space for campaign lies. I assume that candidates will implement their preferred platform but are free to choose misleading campaign messages. While a large lie may, conditional on being believed, substantially increase a candidate's vote share, it is also risky as large lies trigger prominent fact-checking messages.
Candidates thus strategically choose campaign messages and a corresponding airtime allocation to try to crowd out less favourable messages. Airtime and lies may thus act both as strategic complements, since a large airtime is likely to crowd-out fact-checking and therefore makes large lies less risky, or strategic substitutes, as a candidate with a small airtime may use extreme lies as last recourse strategy to trigger fact-checking and distract voters from his opponent's prominent discourse. In equilibrium, competition for voters' attention gives rise to license to lie dynamics between the candidates, as the airtime pressure reduces the risk of fact-checking messages being remembered. To better understand the drivers of candidates' choice to emphasize certain topics and the resulting information loss for voters, I intend to extend my model to a multi-topic setting.

As a second project, I intend to empirically investigate what makes certain audiences particularly receptive to certain political narratives.
Economic models have recently started including narratives in a variety of settings, an efficient narrative being understood as something shifting a receiver's beliefs or sense of his own objective. The question of what makes narratives efficient has nonetheless remained largely open. In the age of political micro-targeting and social media, understanding what makes some receivers particularly receptive to and willing to share certain narratives however appears key to understand the spread of political narratives. As "narratives" are multi-faceted and the possible sources of their effectiveness range from identity self-signalling motives to a taste for suspense, I intend to empirically investigate competing hypotheses, possibly using social media data.