The more time politicians spend stalking your social media profile, the less they actually care about learning how to run the country.
April 10, 2026
Original Paper
When Politicians Stop Learning: Social Media and the Quality of Democratic Representation
SSRN · 6440962
The Takeaway
We usually worry about social media spreading lies, but this paper highlights a deeper threat: data-driven campaigning. Because politicians can now use precise profiles to persuade you, they no longer have any incentive to study complex policy issues to win your vote.
From the abstract
The political economy literature on social media has primarily focused on misinformation and polarization. We highlight a different and overlooked channel: the effect of data-driven voter profiling on politicians' incentives to acquire policyrelevant information. We develop a model in which an incumbent politician can exert costly effort to learn about an uncertain state of the world before proposing a policy to a representative voter. The politician does not perfectly observe the voter's prior