ON THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION MANIPULATION IN DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS

This article studies information manipulation during a democratic election. In our model, candidates manipulate public signals about their welfare impact, and a fraction of the electorate naively ignores manipulation. We derive three main findings. First, information manipulation is detrimental to candidate selection and aggravates the dispersion of political attitudes. Second, both educating voters and creating institutions to eliminate false information may involve a trade-off between improving candidate selection and aggravating the dispersion of political attitudes. Third, if and only if the share of naive voters is sufficiently large, information manipulation and the dispersion of political attitudes are mutually reinforcing.