Essays in political economy: The press, petitions and political campaigns

One of the defining features of democracy is that it involves decisions by many different people, from citizens to politicians and party leaders, and that the knowledge relevant for these decisions is dispersed among many different individuals and groups. For example, voters often know more about their own policy preferences than the politicians who represent them. Local politicians are more deeply embedded in their local communities than national politicians, and might better understand their community's needs. And when a politician launches their party's platform, they are in a better position to judge the future consequences of their plans than the electorate is. It is thus crucial to study the use of knowledge in politics and whether voters and politicians can convey their relevant knowledge to each other and whether this is then used, abused, or, potentially, ignored. Do politicians vote for the policies their constituents want? Do local politicians actually rely on their local knowledge when making local policy decisions, or do they follow the national party line? And do politicians run informative campaigns, or do they try to conceal information from the electorate?

This underscores the need to study not just elections, but also other mediating institutions that help voters and politicians gain or communicate information not just on, but also before and after election day. While elections are an important component of democracy, neither politics nor democracy stops at the ballot box. A key feature of the three substantive chapters of my thesis is that I study how mediating institutions, like the media, political parties, and activists, change what elections can and cannot achieve in terms of policy outcomes (in all three chapters) and political representation (in chapter 4). Specifically, I study whether and how these mediating institutions change what voters know at election time. In the remainder of the introduction, I will give an overview of these three chapters. Chapter 2 focuses on the decline of local media, how this distorts electoral and career incentives, and its implications for local and national governance. Chapter 3 is an empirical study of the rise of the daily newspaper in the 19th-century United States and studies how this contributed to a rise in civic engagement in the form of petitioning Members of Congress. Chapter 4 develops a formal model of political campaigns to examine how and when politicians choose to make specific promises -- or remain vague -- in order to reveal or conceal information from voters. Together, these chapters contribute to our understanding of how mediating institutions shape what voters know and politicians know, how they act on that knowledge, and what the role of elections in democracies is.