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. (JEL D72, D83)
In a world in which rational individuals may hold different prior beliefs, a sender can influence the behavior of a receiver by controlling the informativeness of an experiment (public signal). We characterize the set of distributions of posterior beliefs that can be induced by an experiment, and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a sender to benefit from persuasion. We then provide sufficient conditions for the sender to benefit from persuasion for almost every pair of prior beliefs, even when there is no value of persuasion under a common prior. Our main condition is that the receiver's action depends on his beliefs only through his expectation of some random variable.JEL classification: D72, D83, M31.
We develop a dynamic repeated election model in which citizen-candidates are distinguished by both their ideology and valence. Voters observe an incumbent's valence and policy choices, but only know the challenger's party. Our model provides a rich set of novel results. In contrast to existing predictions from static models, we prove that dynamic considerations make higher valence incumbents more likely to compromise and win re-election, even though they compromise to more extreme policies. Consequently, we find that the correlation between valence and extremist policies rises with office-holder seniority. This result may help explain previous empirical findings. Despite this result, we establish that the whole electorate gains from improvements in the distribution of valences. In contrast, fixing average valence, the greater dispersion in valence associated with a high-valence political elite always benefits the median voter, but can harm a majority of voters when voters are sufficiently risk averse. We then consider interest groups or activists who search for candidates with better skills. We derive a complete theoretical explanation for the intuitive conjectures that policies are more extreme when interest groups and activists have more extreme ideologies, and that such extremism reduces the welfare of all voters. JEL classification: D72.
We study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model in which voters have incomplete information. We first identify a novel "party competition effect" in a setting with two opposing parties. Compared with "at large" selection of candidates, party selection makes office-holders more willing to avoid extreme ideological stands, and this benefits voters of all ideologies. We then allow for additional parties. With strategic voting, citizens benefit most when the only two parties receiving votes are more moderate. With sincere voting, even with three parties, extreme parties can thrive at the expense of a middle party; and whether most citizens prefer two or three parties varies with model parameters.
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