  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.
