American Economic Review Vol. 106 No. 11 2016

Persuading Voters

Ricardo Alonso¹; Odilon Câmara²

¹ London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom, and CEPR (e-mail: ) · ² University of Southern California, 3670 Trousdale Parkway, Suite 308, BRI-308 MC-0804, Los Angeles, CA 90089 (e-mail: )

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.

DOI

10.1257/aer.20140737

Volume

106

Issue

11

Pages

3590-3605

Language

en

Sources

bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite

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