Persuading Voters

18 Pages Posted: 12 Nov 2015

See all articles by Ricardo Alonso

Ricardo Alonso

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - Department of Management

Odilon Camara

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business

Date Written: November 10, 2015

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 non-unanimous 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.

Keywords: Strategic experimentation, persuasion, voting

JEL Classification: D72, D83

Suggested Citation

Alonso, Ricardo and Camara, Odilon, Persuading Voters (November 10, 2015). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2688969 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2688969

Ricardo Alonso

London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE) - Department of Management ( email )

United Kingdom

HOME PAGE: http://www.lse.ac.uk/management/people/ralonso.aspx

Odilon Camara (Contact Author)

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business ( email )

701 Exposition Blvd
Los Angeles, CA California 90089
United States

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