Essays in Political Attention

Abstract

This dissertation comprises three essays examining how economic incentives shape political attention and how political attention shapes equilibrium outcomes. The first essay, joint with Shakked Noy, links the contemporary American ``culture war'' to changes in media technologies in the 1980s and to the cable news networks which responded to the new incentives of the era. We trace cable news' emphasis on cultural over economic issues to a distinctive business strategy: culture attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news (``mobilization''); economics attracts viewers who would otherwise watch competing news outlets (``poaching''); and the number mobilized by culture is greater than the number poached by economics, so culture increases viewership. We show these incentives can account for a significant fraction of the time-series increase in cultural conflict since 1996. The second essay, joint with Leonardo Bursztyn, Georgy Egorov, Ingar Haaland, and Christopher Roth, examines the role of rationales in facilitating dissent. We experimentally show that liberals are more willing to express opposition to the movement to defund the police, are seen as less prejudiced, and face lower social sanctions when able to cite credible scientific evidence supporting their position. Analogous experiments with conservatives demonstrate that the same mechanisms facilitate anti-immigrant expression. The third essay, joint with Leonardo Bursztyn, Jonathan Kolstad, Pietro Tebaldi, and Noam Yuchtman, documents a pattern of ``political adverse selection'' in the health insurance exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act: Republicans enrolled at lower rates than Democrats and independents, a gap driven by healthier Republicans. This selection raised public subsidy spending by approximately $155 per enrollee annually (3.2% of average cost).