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Elections with Privately Informed Parties and Voters

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Abstract

This paper studies a situation in which parties are betterinformed than voters about the optimal policies for voters. Weshow that voters are able to infer the parties' information byobserving their electoral positions, even if parties have policypreferences which differ substantially from the median voter's.Unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions, we assumethat voters have some private information of their own. If theinformation available to voters is biased, parties' attempts toinfluence voters' beliefs will result in less than fullconvergence even if parties know with certainty the optimalpolicy for the median voter.

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Martinelli, C. Elections with Privately Informed Parties and Voters. Public Choice 108, 147–167 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017514106456

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