Persuading voters

Alonso, Ricardo ORCID: 0000-0001-9559-0864 and Câmara, Odilon (2016) Persuading voters. American Economic Review, 106 (11). pp. 3590-3605. ISSN 0002-8282

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Abstract

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters' choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician's optimal experiment. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters' heterogeneity by designing an experiment with realizations targeting different winning coalitions. Consequently, under a simple-majority rule, a majority of voters might be strictly worse off due to the politician's influence. We characterize voters' preferences over electoral rules and provide conditions for a majority of voters to prefer a supermajority (or unanimity) voting rule, in order to induce the politician to supply a more informative experiment.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/aer
Additional Information:	© 2016 American Economic Association
Divisions:	Management
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Date Deposited:	04 Oct 2016 14:52
Last Modified:	21 Nov 2024 04:12
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/67953

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