Political disagreement and information in elections

Ricardo Alonso and Odilon Câmara

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

Abstract: We study the role of re-election concerns in incumbent parties' incentives to shape the information that reaches voters. In a probabilistic voting model, candidates representing two groups of voters compete for office. In equilibrium, the candidate representing the majority wins with a probability that increases in the degree of political disagreement — the difference in expected payoffs from the candidates' policies. Prior to the election, the office-motivated incumbent party (IP) can influence the degree of disagreement through policy experimentation — a public signal about a payoff-relevant state. We show that if the IP supports the majority candidate, then it strategically designs this experiment to increase disagreement and, hence, the candidate's victory probability. We define conditions such that the IP chooses an upper-censoring experiment and the experiment's informativeness decreases with the majority candidate's competence. The IP uses the experiment to increase disagreement even when political disagreement is due solely to belief disagreement.

Keywords: Disagreement; Bayesian persuasion; Strategic experimentation; Voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-11-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published in Games and Economic Behavior, 2, November, 2016, 100, pp. 390-412. ISSN: 0899-8256

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/68393/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Political disagreement and information in elections (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:68393

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().