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 (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.

Keywords: strategic experimentation; persuasion; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11-11
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 (5)

Published in American Economic Review, 11, November, 2016, 106(11), pp. 3590-3605. ISSN: 0002-8282

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/67953/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Persuading Voters (2016)
Working Paper: Persuading voters (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:67953

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