Persuasion in Politics

Kevin M Murphy and Andrei Shleifer

Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics

Abstract: We present a model of the creation of social networks, such as political parties, trade unions, religious coalitions, or political action committees, through discussion and mutual persuasion among their members. The key idea is that people are influenced by those inside their network, but not by those outside. Once created, networks can be “rented out†to politicians who seek votes and support for their initiatives and ideas, which may have little to do with network members' core beliefs. In this framework, political competition does not lead to convergence of party platforms to the views of the median voter. Rather, parties separate their messages and try to isolate their members to prevent personal influence from those in the opposition.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

Published in American Economic Review

Downloads: (external link)
http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/27867244/w10248.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Persuasion in Politics (2004)
Working Paper: Persuasion in Politics (2004)
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:hrv:faseco:27867244

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Scholarly Articles from Harvard University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Office for Scholarly Communication (osc@harvard.edu).