Manipulated voters in competitive election campaigns

Kemal Kivanc Akoz () and Cemal Eren Arbatli ()

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: We provide a game-theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a continuum of Bayesian voters. Voters are uncertain about candidate positions, which are exogenously given and lie on a unidimensional policy space. Candidates take unobservable, costly actions to manipulate a campaign signal that would otherwise be fully informative about a candidate’s distance from voters relative to the other candidate. We show that if the candidates differ in campaigning efficiency, and voters receive the manipulated signal with an individual, random noise, then the cost-efficient candidate wins the election even if she is more distant from the electorate than her opponent is. In contrast to the existing election campaign models that do not support information manipulation in equilibrium, our paper rationalizes misleading political advertising and suggests that limits on campaign spending may potentially improve the quality of information available to the electorate

Keywords: Hidden actions; election campaigns; manipulation; propaganda; bias. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 D82 D84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-gth and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
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Published in WP BRP Series: Economics / EC, June 2013, pages 1-36

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hig:wpaper:31/ec/2013

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