Persuading Voters
American Economic Review
vol. 106,
no. 11, November 2016
(pp. 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.Citation
Alonso, Ricardo, and Odilon Câmara. 2016. "Persuading Voters." American Economic Review, 106 (11): 3590-3605. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20140737Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D81 Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty