Divisive campaigning damages democracy

Playful Campaigning

Paul Tennent School of Computing Science University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road Nottingham, NG8 1BB UK [email protected] Nadia Pantidi School of Applied Psychology University College Cork North Mall Campus, College Road Cork, T12 YN60 Ireland [email protected] Steve Benford School of Computing Science University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus, Wollaton Road Not...

The Complexity of Campaigning

In “The Logic of Campaigning”, Dean and Parikh consider a candidate making campaign statements to appeal to the voters. They model these statements as Boolean formulas over variables that represent stances on the issues, and study optimal candidate strategies under three proposed models of voter preferences based on the assignments that satisfy these formulas. We prove that voter utility evalua...

The Logic of Campaigning

We consider the issue of the sort of statements which a candidate running for office might make during the course of the campaign. We assume that there are various issues on which different groups of voters have preferences and that the candidate is aware of these different groups and their preferences. Her problem is to choose statements which will have the net effect of improving her percepti...

The Strategy of Campaigning

We prove an abstract theorem which shows that under certain circumstances, a candidate running for political office should be as explicit as possible in order to improve her impression among the voters. But this result conflicts with the perceived reality that candidates are often cagey and reluctant to take stances except when absolutely necessary. Why this hesitation on the part of the candid...

Campaigning Online, Locally