I think in European politics there's also a fair amount of work tracing out this idea that
people tend to get reinforcing information.
Hello and welcome everybody to Game Changer, a podcast by TWS Partners. My name's Florian.
This is Simon.
And this is Miriam.
And in this podcast, we explore applications of game theory in business and everyday life.
Hello and welcome to today's episode.
Maybe if you had this experience before, you're scrolling through social media or reading the news
and at some point you start to wonder, am I really getting the full picture or am I just
seeing the same perspective, same information over and over again?
So our guest today, Adam Meirowitz, professor of political science with a courtesy appointment
in economics at Yale University, will shed some light on this from a political perspective.
So please enjoy the episode.
Adam, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
I'm excited that there's a place where people that think about strategy and incentives and
aren't boring academics, engage in this stuff.
So hopefully this is fun for people.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm sure of it.
Before we dive into everything, because we are going to talk a lot about elections and
voters and all of these things today.
And since your focus of research, or at least what we will be discussing today, is the US,
I think it makes sense for our listeners based in Europe and also myself, if you could briefly
give us the core features or the core aspects of the US election system, if you remind us
the two-party system, how do the candidates compete and all of that, so we have the right
setting.
Definitely.
And this is probably even a caricature of American elections.
And maybe it seems very abstract for Europeans where things seem more complicated.
But for us, the idea is that elections are largely about two parties competing for office,
that the winner is chosen by majority rule, sort of winner take all is sometimes our term.
And it's also a tradition where we think of candidates for the most part stake out some
notion of policy that they would implement or at least try to implement if they're in
office.
And voters are evaluating these platforms almost as commitments and then making a choice.
And it's largely a tradition where we think of things on a one-dimensional spatial spectrum.
So thinking about there are platforms that could be more leftist or more rightist.
In Europe, the interpretation may be a little different, maybe not that different.
And then there's sort of another feature, which is not always involved when game theorists
do American politics, but it's becoming increasingly important, which is in addition to this spatial
ideological aspect.
We also think there's a vertical dimension.
So candidates could generally be better and more or less everyone agrees about people
that are less corrupt, more organised, more reputable, have money that they can use in
productive ways for campaigning.
And so we really think about two-party competition when platforms are commitments on a spatial
sense and voters look at both this horizontal spatial sense and also some vertical components.
Okay, that's a great introduction.
And to continue this a little bit from the game theoretic side, or at least the economic
side, guessing some of our voters remember from their studies, maybe the median voter.
So there's a classical models that go in that direction.
And in these models, candidates are often predicted to converge to the centre in the
political sense.
Where does this come from and why?
Is it a benchmark for your research or is it a benchmark for your research at all?
Yeah, no, definitely a research.
And if I'm honest, in political economy, this is a tradition that probably dates back to
like the 1920s when industrial organisation economists were thinking about, here's a
simple story.
You're trying to locate on a boardwalk or on a single street and where the firms that
are trying to maximise their customers locate.
And there's a centrist force.
You sort of locate in the middle of the boardwalk or in the middle of town.
In the 50s, this intuition jumped into political science where Anthony Downs sort of talked
about competition on an ideological spectrum.
And there's this really strong force for locating at the preferences of the median voter.
And so our idea is that we have a bunch of voters.
They each have some spatial ideal point.
They look for candidates that are closest to their ideal point.
And the idea is that if one of the candidates is located at the point where the median voter
is located, a candidate that's to the right of her is going to get less than half of the
people voting for her.
And the candidate at the median gets more than half.
And similarly, if a candidate's to the left of this median, she'll get less than half.
And so when voters are looking at candidates and the candidates care about winning, we have
this incredibly strong result.
You locate at the median voter.
This logic then jumped into work where we thought about parties actually having policy
motivation.
So it wasn't about winning, but it was about winning with policies that they liked.
And so the idea is that if you thought about one party that liked right-wing policies, another
party that liked left-wing policies, they still in equilibrium would have to locate
at the median voter's ideal point.
If you're at the middle and I move to the right, it's great for me if I win, but I'm
going to get less than half the voters.
And so I lose.
And so the only story that makes sense as an equilibrium is locating at the middle.
And it wasn't until we thought about introducing some uncertainty.
And so if you think about parties that don't know exactly where the median voter lies,
maybe there's uncertainty about who's going to show up on election day.
Maybe there's uncertainty about some national tide where all the voters decide they're a
little bit more leftist than we thought they were.
So then when you have uncertainty about where this median voter is, candidates that care
about policy face a tradeoff.
If they locate at where they think it's most likely that the median voter lies, they're
more likely to win.
If they locate at a platform closer to their end of the policy spectrum, so rightist parties
locate to the right, they're happier if they win because when elected, they enact a policy
that biases policy in their favour.
So we got in the 80s, Calvert and Whitman is sort of the famous papers, this idea that
there's a stark tradeoff.
If I moderate my platform towards the place where it's likely that the median is, I win
with higher probability, but I'm less happy when I win.
If I choose a more extreme platform, I win with lower probability, but I'm happier when
I win.
And so equilibrium has both parties balancing this out.
And what we get is finally a prediction for platforms that are not the same.
Rightists compromise a little bit, but they're still right of centre.
Leftists are left of centre.
And then from the 80s till now, we've had lots of cool papers that add neat moving parts
and abstractions and generalisations to this core logic.
Yeah, very interesting that introducing the uncertainty will lead then to different equilibria
and not the typical split the voters, so to say.
Great.
In your most recent paper, you also think about selective exposure in the context of
this electoral competition.
And you introduced something that is called echo chambers, or at least they play a role
there in your model.
Can you tell us what echo chambers are in this context?
Yeah, yeah.
For us, this was sort of an attempt to introduce to this research tradition, these models dating
from Hotelling in the 20s to Calvert-Whitman in the 80s, the starkest description of what
we think is going on with the media now.
So we used to think that voters all roughly got the same information about elections.
In the US, there used to be a world where there were three networks that would tune
in and tell you about elections.
But if you think about going from a small number of media outlets to cable, to the
internet, to every other form of social media, the idea is now that we think for the most
part, individuals have these curated media feeds.
Like they get information that makes them happy, whatever it is that drives them to
demand certain kinds of facts or certain kinds of discussions.
And so we have this sense, definitely in American politics, there's a lot of empirical
work.
I think in European politics, there's also a fair amount of work tracing out this idea
that people tend to get reinforcing information.
So if I'm right of centre, I'm super happy to hear other people that are right of centre
tell me how wonderful candidates that are right of centre are, tell me that right of
centre candidates are going to win, tell me that left of centre candidates are incredibly
corrupt and no one likes them and they're not going to win.
And so there's this logic that maybe this is sort of this vicious cycle where everyone
to the right gets very homogeneous, but biassed or skewed type of information.
Everyone to the left gets some different biassed or skewed information.
Of course, maybe things are more nuanced and we partition this ideological space into
different categories.
But we're trying to think about how this idea of selective exposure or echo chambers
might impact the strategic incentives for candidates.
Do they moderate more or less?
So basically echo chamber means that my beliefs as a voter are reinforced because I only get
selective information about the candidates.
Yeah, exactly.
And we're sort of agnostic on, I think, two different directions or mechanisms.
It could be that the sources that are providing information and selling stuff on the internet
are getting increasingly good at targeting people.
So they sort of know what makes me happy and what I tune into.
And so they send information that's biassed in favour of what I want to hear.
Or it could be that it's just who do I choose to listen to?
Which news services do I choose to go on to?
Who are the people that I communicate with?
So it could be just which friends do I talk about politics with?
Or it could be, you know, what's going on on my phone.
Probably both.
Yeah.
So digging a little bit deeper on these echo chambers, they are often identified,
and I think that makes sense, as a reason for this increased polarisation, right?
If you always get the same good news about your preferred candidate.
But how do these echo chambers change the strategic incentives of the candidates?
You already mentioned that.
When they choose their platforms, are there any trade-offs they're facing?
How does it play out?
Yeah, that's sort of at the heart of what we wanted to do.
So we had in mind this idea.
And I should say, this is largely a paper with Avi Acharya, Peter Boussire, and Floyd Zhang,
various sort of co-authors.
And so we wanted to think about what would happen in this classic model of elections
when there aren't echo chambers.
And then understand what would happen in equilibrium when there are echo chambers
and make this comparison.
And so the first thing we confronted is,
well, if we're going to tell a story about how echo chambers affect candidate positioning,
we have to think about the channel by which echo chambers influence voters in the model.
And so this required that there's something for voters to learn
that potentially gets influenced by the news that they tune into
or the news that they listen to.
And what I traced out before is how a candidate would face this trade-off
between uncertainty about how voters are going to vote,
where the median voter lies, and winning.
And so we had to take a step back and think about
how the presence of echo chambers influences voting behaviour
or voter processing of information.
And then how that would shape how candidates think about
the probability that the median voter is in a particular place.
So the way we go about this is thinking that,
you know, an echo chamber could largely be a way that voters learn about
the policies that candidates are going to enact, the horizontal spatial dimension.
Or an echo chamber could be a way that voters are largely learning about
these vertical dimensions, you know, which candidates are more liked,
which ones are more competent, which ones are more likely to win, and so forth.
And there's a little introspection.
I think about everyone except the nerdiest political scientists.
And I don't think we really have a media feed that's giving us detailed documentation
of exactly what tax rate is going to be enacted
and how, you know, various policy interventions are going to go about.
We all get the sort of looser, more about the process
and about what people think version of politics in our flow.
So that made us think that the first order thing that's going on with these echo chambers is,
it's about this vertical dimension.
And so the starkest way that we could formalise this idea of,
if you're right of centre, you get good news about the right candidate
and bad news about the left candidate and vice versa,
is to think that there's a media outlet.
The media outlet learns true facts about which candidates are better or worse.
So these vertical dimensions.
And if I'm a right-wing person, a right-wing voter,
and I'm choosing into a right-wing outlet,
if there's in fact some good news about the right-wing candidate,
it's going to show up in my feed.
And if there's some bad news about the left candidate,
it's going to show up in my feed.
But if I'm a right-wing person tuning into news that makes me happy
and there's bad news about the right-wing candidates,
those stories just may not reach me.
And if there's good news about the other party, the opposition party,
those stories might not reach me.
And so this is the way that the echo chamber is sending biassed information
to voters based on whether or not they tend to be right or left of centre.
And so this shapes how much the voters learn about the vertical dimension.
And so now, given that, if we take a step back and think about
the candidates balancing this probability of winning if they moderate
versus how happy they are if they win by not moderating,
what we have going on is in the world with an echo chamber,
it seems like the voters are going to be learning less
about these vertical dimensions
because they don't get the bad news and they only...
Okay, so if you're a candidate,
if voters can only evaluate candidates based on two things,
this vertical dimension,
how good or bad they think one of the candidates are,
and the spatial dimension,
which candidate is closer to them on policy directions.
If the echo chamber is reducing
how much they learn about the vertical dimension,
then it has to make voting more responsive
to the horizontal, to the policy dimension.
Okay, and so that means from the candidate's perspective,
the impact of moderating is higher, right?
If I moderate, this increases the probability
that I win by a lot more in the presence of an echo chamber
than in the world without an echo chamber
where voters are learning a lot
about these vertical dimensions,
and so that matters a lot.
And so what happens is in the model with the echo chamber,
candidate voting turns out to be more responsive
to policy platforms,
and so this makes the way
that candidates balance these things out more moderate,
right, because if the probability of winning
is much more responsive to their policy platforms,
they'll moderate more, polarise less.
And so in fact, when there's less learning
because of these echo chambers,
there's more responsiveness to policy,
and so the candidates wind up being more moderate
in a model without these biassed or selective exposure.
Yeah, so the punchline is sort of,
I think, the opposite of conventional wisdom.
As you make the media a more biassed source of information
about these vertical dimensions,
you necessarily make candidates believe
that voters are more responsive
to the horizontal dimension,
and this causes them to moderate.
And so it's sort of the opposite mechanism
that you would get compared to a model
in which selective exposure was just about policy.
Okay, so the additional dimension
leads to this a little bit counterintuitive fact
that actually the polarisation
does not increase through the echo chambers,
but the candidates actually choose the moderate platforms.
Right, and so, you know,
I think there's plenty of work out there
that traces out sort of the conventional wisdom
that polarisation has to be the result of echo chambers.
You know, what this work says is,
well, wait a second,
if we try to think about that direct channel,
it matters what we think selective exposure is about,
what we think the first-order effects of media are.
And so if what we're learning the most about
from social media are vertical dimensions,
then it shouldn't be the case
that echo chambers are the causal reason for polarisation.
Now, I think polarisation has been happening,
certainly in the US,
probably in European cases as well,
and we think echo chambers are probably happening,
but this makes me less convinced
that it's echo chambers causing polarisation
rather there must be some other things floating around,
and simultaneously we're getting polarisation
and we're getting echo chambers increasing,
but that's not a simple causal story.
Do you have a theory
about what the other influences could be?
I have ideas, I don't have a theory,
and I don't have an empirical story,
although I will admit it's sort of a mixed bag.
On the simplistic view,
this is a reason why I think there's plenty of job security
for people like me.
Like, there's still a lot of open questions
for us to think through equilibrium forces
and think through what we can learn from data, right?
There's a challenge here,
which is polarisation is a story,
I think for most people,
about preferences of individuals
and preferences of parties,
or maybe it's a story about behaviour that we observe,
and the challenge is I can see who votes in elections
and I can see how they vote
and I can see the platforms parties take,
but I don't directly see the preferences of the parties
or the preferences of the voters,
and what game theory teaches me is I need a model
and I need to let an equilibrium story
to think about how primitives like preferences
or information map into observables
like platforms and voting,
and unless I can think about those channels,
I have a hard time figuring out what's driving what.
I have co-authors and friends
that are much better statisticians than I am
that are sort of bridging this gap
and doing structural work
to try to reverse engineer from equilibrium analysis
what the data teaches us,
and so I'm optimistic
that people are trying to answer these questions,
but I don't think we know why.
Okay, there's a lot of mystery left then.
That's fair.
A lot of room for research also, of course.
Talking about mystery maybe a little bit more,
so there is one thing you did look at,
and that is what happens in your model
when the voters are not fully rational,
at least in the standard economic sense,
so what does happen
when you assume bounded rationality by the voters?
Does that change your findings
or does it not impact them at all?
Yeah, this was a sort of a fun feature
of this analysis for my co-authors and I,
and so if we take a step back
and think about how we're modelling echo chambers,
I had this idea that I tune into a source
that's only going to tell me things that I want to hear,
it's going to hide things that I don't want to hear,
and so there's sort of this second-order question of,
is no news bad news or is no news no news, right?
So if I've chosen to listen to people
that will tell me what I want to hear,
and I'm not hearing very much,
presumably that means that the facts are against me, right?
If I don't hear anything,
that must be because there's some really compelling story
that my candidate's not very good
and the other candidate is much better,
and so there's a question for us,
do I choose to live in an echo chamber or information silo
and only hear what I want to hear,
but on election day do I remember
that I chose to get this biassed source of information
and think that no news is bad news,
or do I forget about this process?
And so we don't want to jump in
and take the hardcore full rationality perspective
and say that our citizens have chosen to have echo chambers,
but they're fully aware of the selection effects.
Instead, what we do is we have a parameter.
On one end of the spectrum,
our voters are quite cognisant of what's going on.
They're fully aware of these selection effects,
and so if they don't hear news,
they know that's bad news and they update accordingly.
On the other end of the spectrum,
they completely forget about these selection effects.
They pretend they don't happen,
and so if they hear good news about their candidate,
that impacts them a lot.
If they hear bad news about the other candidate,
that impacts them a lot.
They don't hear very much.
They say, oh, there was nothing to learn, okay?
And so we then go through and solve,
so what is the equilibrium to this game
for all the possible levels of how rational
or Bayesian our people are
versus how boundedly rational they are
in this very particular sense?
And what we found is, as I mentioned,
so compared to neutral, unbiased information,
echo chambers cause the equilibria
to have more moderation.
However, if I think about the presence of an echo chamber,
as I increase the bias,
and so as I move away from full rationality,
I do increase the level of polarisation, okay?
And so there is this partial explanation
for maybe what's driving polarisation,
which is the presence of echo chambers
with people becoming increasingly uncognizant
that they're getting biassed information,
that does lead to a pattern of increased polarisation.
So that could be one explanation
for why we actually see the polarisation, yeah.
Yeah, selective exposure and full cognition
that we had selective exposure
doesn't get you to polarisation,
but given we have selective exposure,
people that are forgetful about the fact
that there's a selection bias,
that does lead to changes
in how much polarisation we should observe
from the candidates.
Yeah, those people that are maybe not suspicious
about getting no news about any candidate,
those are the ones that could drive this
rather than the right direction of polarisation, yeah.
Right, and the pathway is that
if I'm cognisant about the selection effects,
I know that I didn't learn very much from the media,
and so I don't know very much
about the vertical dimension,
and so I have to sort of base my decision
a bit more on the horizontal dimension.
But if I'm not aware of the selection effects
and I get fooled,
I think I'm learning a lot
about the vertical dimension,
so I underweight the horizontal dimension,
and so candidates would be relatively more polarised.
Interesting explanation, yeah.
Probably also have to look at some more research
to find out whether that is really the true one reason.
Exactly, yeah.
You have worked in this field
of electoral competition,
also beyond this echo chambers,
and is there anything else
that could help explain why
and how candidates choose platforms
in your research?
Yeah, so an intuition
that came out of this analysis,
which we don't emphasise in the paper
that I guess I've been summarising,
is a source for added strategic uncertainty
in elections in general,
and so the logic is this.
Depending on the uncertainty
that the candidates face
about where voters are,
it's possible that they're pretty convinced
there's a pretty tight band
of where the median is in the middle,
but then there are these fat tails,
and so there's non-trivial chances
that something dramatic is going to happen
between the time
that they sketch out platforms and voting
in which they could win
with very extreme positions,
and so the logic is that
I'm a right-wing party.
I think it's pretty likely
that I know where the median voter is,
and so if both parties announce
very centrist, not equivalent,
but very centrist platforms,
where the median is somewhere in the middle
is going to determine which one wins,
but there's a chance
that something dramatic happens,
and I could win
with a very extreme platform,
very close to the edge of the spectrum
where I'd like to be.
That's an unlikely outcome,
so I'm not likely to win
if I take this extreme platform,
but I'm super happy if I do win,
so there's sort of this Hail Mary logic
of maybe I sometimes announce
very extreme platforms.
It's very likely that I lose,
but the difference between losing
with a moderate platform
and winning with a moderate platform
is pretty negligible.
We're getting centrist policy.
The upside from winning
with a very extreme platform
that I like is huge,
and so there are this sort of forces
in equilibrium that require
that every once in a while,
with some probability,
candidates are taking
quite extreme platforms,
and so there's sort of regularity conditions
that game theorists
have tended to use
that make the models
have nice, tight predictions
about where the candidates locate,
but there are substantively
compelling stories about
maybe there's a bit more uncertainty
about voters
that sort of kill those results,
and then the equilibrium story
has to have more strategic uncertainty
that we thought,
more low probability
that candidates do crazy stuff
because those crazy things might win,
and the downside from losing
with a crazy platform isn't very high.
At the time,
we sort of thought through this.
I had an undergrad at Yale.
He's now a PhD student at Princeton,
Justice Hirasha.
We're sort of fleshing out
some of this logic
and talking with some friends
about doing some empirical work
based on this as well.
Yeah, great.
That would be my next question,
whether there's anything planned
to test your predictions
also about the echo chambers,
of course, in the empirical sense.
Yeah, no.
In the narrow sense,
we're sort of trying
to come up with a model
that lets us track
how variation in a few different things
might explain polarisation, right?
Not just looking at
one causal path at a time,
but thinking about
as many different pieces
of the model as we can
and seeing how they co-vary
and seeing if that can explain
a pattern of what causes polarisation.
This is work to be done,
so I can't really advertise
what we're going to get to.
I don't know the answer.
But then, as I alluded to before,
there's sort of this larger research programme
that I'm occasionally involved in,
but there are other people
that are much more engaged
of trying to use equilibrium models
and careful empirical work
to do some structural analysis
and figure these things out.
So a lot of work to be done.
I think we genuinely don't know
what's causing polarisation.
The character of the empirical work
is a lot of really good papers,
each of which tells us
that any one story
about what causes polarisation
can't be correct.
So we observe polarisation,
we observe lots of things varying,
and we don't quite understand
the determinants yet.
Yeah, it's a very current topic,
so I'm sure we can expect
a lot more research in that area
in solving some of these mysteries.
But for now,
thank you very much for giving us
this very interesting insight
into your research and the outcomes.
And thank you very much
for coming on the podcast
and giving us your time, of course.
Oh, thank you.
This is a lot of fun.
I like the idea that
we're all thinking about strategy
and incentives.
So, cool.
That's great.
Me too.
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