Polarized Extremes and the Confused Centre: Campaign Targeting of Voters with Correlation Neglect

Gilat Levy, Moreno de Barreda, Inés and Ronny Razin

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2021, vol. 16, issue 2, 139-155

Abstract: We model the effect of competing political campaigns on the opinion of voters who exhibit correlation neglect, i.e., fail to understand that different campaigns might be correlated. We show that political campaigners can manipulate voters' beliefs even when voters understand the informativeness of each campaign separately. The optimal coordination of campaigns involves negative correlation of good news and sometimes full positive correlation of bad news. We show that competition in targeted campaigns has the effect of changing the opinions of different groups in different ways; competition increases polarisation among extreme voters but at the same time increases the variance and the quality of moderates' voting decisions.

Keywords: Correlation neglect; behavioural biases; strategic campaigns; polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00019125

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