Accountability under political polarization

About this event

Political polarization, by distorting how citizens process objective information about government performance, can undermine electoral accountability. We study whether citizens in a highly polarized environment can be nudged to become receptive to incorporating information about government performance in their electoral behavior. We supported a local NGO to design and implement a field experiment that exposed some Mexican citizens, via targeted Facebook ads, to benchmarked information about COVID-19 cases and deaths in their municipality prior to the 2021 elections. In municipalities with high relative levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths, the information had a backlash effect, increasing the fraction of the vote received by the local incumbent party. A randomly assigned anti-polarization treatment, however, obviated and reversed the backlash. In the anti-polarization condition, voters rewarded incumbents with low relative levels of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our findings show the potential for nudges to enable the communication of objective information even in polarized contexts with high levels of mistrust and heightened emotions.