Manipulating memories

What's the best way for politicians to manipulate voters' memories? A paper in the latest Economic Journal (draft pdf here) by Yianis Sarafidis gives an answer.
Start from the position that voters are not just ignorant and irrational but also inattentive - they have wonky memories. Rather than remember everything about a politician, our memories are shaped by three principles:
Recency - we remember yesterday's news better than last month's.
Rehearsal - repetition helps us remember.
Cue dependency - current events trigger memories of similar past ones.
A politician considering releasing some good news faces a trade-off between these principles. If he postpones the news until just before election day, he gains the benefit of recency, but loses the opportunity for rehearsal and cue dependency to strengthen the memory.
Sarafidis shows that the choice of when to release good news is an optimization problem with a clear solution - politicians should bunch good news together and separate failures.
Bunching gives the politician benefits of  both cue dependency - today's good story reminds us of last week's good story - and repetition. It also - though this isn't part of Sarafidis's story - exploits the fallacy of local representativeness.
This might explain why Brown's opponents are reviving the 10-year-old story of his tax on pensions. Voters had forgetten this. But Brown's enemies not only want to recall it, but also to provide a platfrom from which cue dependency and repetition will help ram home future bad stories about Brown.

Comments

[Mark Wadsworth]

I was chatting to an American on the Tube recently, and he said he was a Labour-supporter. I reminded him that they were totally incompetent and corrupt, and his reply was "Ah yes, but what about the Tories? What about David Mellor?".

Now that's what I call news-management!

[alabastercodify]

Isn't it because it's only recently that the Treasury agreed to release the papers?

Critics of Brown have always attacked the ACT relief abolition; these papers were always going to be used as a peg on which to hang those criticisms, and to make them stick better; this could have happened any time since the FOI request two years ago.

The more interesting point is how Brown, not his opponents, is trying to trying to manage the voters. He reckons it's better for this to come out now than in a couple of months. Your analysis thus suggests he's made a good tactical move - it will have blown over by the leadership contest; but a bad strategic one - it allows his critics "a platform from which cue dependency and repetition will help ram home future bad stories about" him in time for the GE.

[FH]

I remember Gough Whitlam's speech to the Australian parliament on his dismissal as prime minister. His story about what happened changed during the three-quarter of an hour (?) speech -- a very real demonstration of a politician's belief in spin.