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AbstractDuring the political process, the electorate needs to determine the competence of the government by both observing its policy decisions and acquiring information from the media. However, media reports are often criticized for not being independent and truthful. This paper discusses whether the public can determine the quality of a government from media reports. In other words, are media outlets more likely to act as watchdogs or just as "yes men" to the government? This paper argues that, because of reputational concerns, the media usually avoid criticizing the government. The media only report truthfully when the expected competence of the government is sufficiently low and the probability for the voter to learn from other information sources is sufficiently high. Otherwise, media outlets—especially low-quality outlets—will pander to the government in their reporting. Policy bias or media capture is not required for the yes-man problem to prevail.

Abstract
Deceiving citizens is typically considered the main political motive behind the spread of fake news. Accordingly, strategies to debunk fake news, such as fact-checking, have been suggested to combat it. However, the spread of fake news persists despite these debunking strategies. We propose an alternative but underexplored motive behind the spread of fake news: Fake news aims not only to deceive citizens but also to induce media skepticism. To support our claim, we present a stylized formal model of media skepticism and demonstrate that the incentive to spread fake news persists even if citizens are not deceived by disinformation coming from fake news. Our model highlights the dilemma embedded in fact-checking.

The emerging political economy literature on dictatorial media politics rationalizes the cross-country variation in media freedom by dictators' demand for truthful information. Since a dictator can always punish the media for their truth-telling ex post, concerns of being punished could induce self-censorship and undermine the dictator's promise to media freedom. We study a formal model that brings the dictator's commitment problem to the fore, and characterize situations in which the commitment problem is especially severe. Our analysis suggests that neglecting self-censorship would lead to underestimating the amount of missing information in autocracies as well as overestimating the autocrats' level of tolerance for criticisms and authoritarian responsiveness. Based on the comparative statics, we contend that the variation in media outlets' quality and penetration can be leveraged to recover missing information due to self-censorship.

Who is more influential in shaping citizens' health-related behaviors, experts or politicians? We conduct five conjoint experiments on 6,255 residents of France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, asking them to evaluate COVID-19 vaccines alongside randomly varying endorsements from national politicians and medical professionals. In every country, our results show that citizens are more likely to rely on medical professionals, the experts, more than on politicians when choosing a COVID-19 vaccine. Even after accounting for citizens' political alignment with the government, our evidence reveals that politicians play a very limited role in shaping vaccine acceptance. These results have implications for the role of political elites in shaping people's behaviors amid a large-scale crisis.

AbstractThis paper aims to answer a general question: whether an international organization (IO) is able to shape public opinion in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the pandemic took hold in early 2020, countries across the globe have switched gear from prevention to vaccination. Most had to not only secure a sufficient supply of vaccines, but also to curb vaccine hesitancy among their populations. Can endorsement by an international organization like the World Health Organization (WHO) enhance a vaccine's acceptability? Based on a survey experiment conducted in Taiwan, our study leverages the special relationship between China and Taiwan to show that WHO endorsement can induce acceptance of Chinese vaccines among Taiwanese people. However, the effect is found to be contextual in the sense that it only works when people's trust in the WHO is higher than their trust in the vaccine's country of origin. Our study not only contributes to the literature of IO legitimacy by empirically showing IOs' causal effects on public opinion, but also sheds light on how a vaccine's credibility can be enhanced to promote vaccination uptake.