Persuading Voters

Ricardo Alonso and Odilon Câmara

American Economic Review, 2016, vol. 106, issue 11, 3590-3605

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 nonunanimous 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.

JEL-codes: D72 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.20140737
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

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Working Paper: Persuading voters (2016)
Working Paper: Persuading voters (2014)
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