Jurisdictional Information Mismatch: The Structural Inversion of Democratic Information Availability

Abstract

This paper introduces jurisdictional information mismatch (JIM) as a named concept in communication and democratic theory. The argument is that platform-era information systems operated according to an inverted geography: their economic and technical architecture systematically produced and amplified information about national and global actors while structurally underserving local and municipal information environments. The result is a structural mismatch between the geography of democratic power, which is concentrated at the local level for most citizens in most governance contexts, and the geography of information availability, which is overwhelmingly oriented toward national and global scales. JIM is developed as an architectural condition produced by three intersecting forces: accelerating local newsroom closure, platform recommendation systems that are jurisdictionally blind by design, and the attention economy's structural preference for scale. The paper distinguishes JIM from adjacent concepts (news deserts, information gaps, algorithmic bias, market failure), situates it within the Control Room Theory of Democracy as the spatial dimension of the democratic information deficit, and proposes the Jurisdictional Information Coverage Ratio (JICR) as a measurement instrument. Three case strands—the Canadian local news closure, the Fischer et al. (2020) Google News audit, and the Hayes and Lawless (2021) causal-chain study of US congressional districts—illustrate the construct's empirical traction. The paper concludes with policy implications: existing supply-side regulatory responses address local newsroom collapse but do not address the platform distribution architecture that systematically deprioritizes local content.

KEYWORDS: Local Journalism, News Deserts, Platform Governance, Democratic Theory, Information Mismatch, Jurisdictional Federalism, Algorithmic Distribution, Civic Engagement