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Advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty

  • We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author(s):Ernesto Reuben, Christian Traxler, Frans van Winden
Parent Title (English):European Economic Review
Publication year:2015
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
First Page:16
Last Page:36
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2015.07.003
Release Date:2016/02/19
Tag:Advocacy groups; Information transmission; Median voter; Political convergence; Voting
Volume:78
Notes:
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in European Economic Review. The final authenticated version is available online at: DOI 10.1016/j.euroecorev.2015.07.003
Hertie School Research:Political Economy | Cluster
Licence of document (German):Metadaten (öffentlich), post-print
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