Persuading Voters
American Economic Review · 2016 · Volume 106 · Issue 11
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.
Keywords
Political Processes: Rent-Seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior, Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
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