Manipulation through political endorsements
نویسنده
چکیده
We study elections with three candidates under plurality voting. A candidate is a Condorcet loser if the majority of the voters place that candidate at the bottom of their preference rankings. We rst show that a Condorcet loser might win the election in a three-way race. Next we introduce to the model an endorser who has private information about the true probability distribution of the preferences of the voters. Observable endorsements facilitate coordination among voters who may otherwise split their votes and lead to the victory of the condorcet loser. When the endorser has an ideological bias towards one of the candidates, the coordination impact of endorsements remains unaltered, moreover the endorser successfully manipulates the outcome of the election in favor of his bias, even if his ideological bias is known by the voters. The results are true for any endorsement cost and any magnitude of bias as long as the electorate is large enough. I am indebted to Faruk Gul for guidance at every stage of this work. I am also grateful for very detailed suggestions and comments to David-Austen Smith, Andrea Wilson and the participants of the sudent seminar at Princeton University. Nuh Aygun Dalkiran provided excellent research assistance. I thank an associate editor and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments. All remaining errors are my own. yKellogg School of Management, MEDS Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail: [email protected].
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عنوان ژورنال:
- J. Economic Theory
دوره 144 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2009