Competition, Politics, & Social Media

TL;DR

This paper explores how social media lowers communication costs, increasing political competition and incumbency advantage by enabling more entrants and asymmetric effects of news on challengers and incumbents.

Contribution

It demonstrates that increased social media use can intensify political competition while paradoxically strengthening incumbents through asymmetric news effects.

Findings

More entrants lead to higher incumbency chances.

Negative news impacts challengers more than positive news benefits them.

Social media can both intensify competition and reinforce incumbency advantage.

Abstract

An increasing number of politicians are relying on cheaper, easier to access technologies such as online social media platforms to communicate with their constituency. These platforms present a cheap and low-barrier channel of communication to politicians, potentially intensifying political competition by allowing many to enter political races. In this study, we demonstrate that lowering costs of communication, which allows many entrants to come into a competitive market, can strengthen an incumbent's position when the newcomers compete by providing more information to the voters. We show an asymmetric bad-news-good-news effect where early negative news hurts the challengers more than the positive news benefit them, such that in aggregate, an incumbent politician's chances of winning is higher with more entrants in the market. Our findings indicate that communication through social media and other platforms can intensify competition, how-ever incumbency advantage may be strengthened rather than weakened as an outcome of higher number of entrants into a political market.