Technological Change, Campaign Spending and Polarization

(with Pau Balart and Orestis Troumpounis)

[paper, video1,  video2]

We focus on changes in technology and campaign management to unravel possible explanations behind the documented simultaneous increase in campaign spending and polarization. In our model, some voters are ideological and vote based on policy proposals (à la Downs), while others are impressionable and vote based on costly campaign advertising (à la Tullock). If the distribution of voters between types is endogenous and depends on parties’ platform choices, our results show that a) an increase in the effectiveness of electoral advertising or a decrease in the electorate’s political awareness, surely increases polarization and may also increase campaign spending, while b) a decrease in the cost of electoral advertising does not affect neither polarization nor campaign spending.