Persuading voters

Ricardo Alonso and Odilon Câmara

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (information controller) can influence voters’ choices by designing the information content of a public signal. We characterize the controller’s optimal signal. With a non-unanimous voting rule, she exploits voters’ heterogeneity by designing a signal with realizations targeting di↵erent winning-coalitions. Consequently, under simple-majority voting rule, a majority of voters might be strictly worse o↵ due to the controller’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 controller to supply a more informative signal.

Keywords: information control; persuasion; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2014-06-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/58674/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Persuading Voters (2016)
Working Paper: Persuading voters (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:58674

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