Voter Priming Campaigns: Strategies, Equilibria, and Algorithms
This addresses strategic campaign planning for political parties and candidates, providing algorithmic insights into optimal spending, though it is incremental in applying game theory to political science.
The paper tackles the problem of campaign spending strategies for voter priming in multi-issue, multi-party elections, showing that pure equilibrium spending exists and can be computed efficiently for parliamentary elections, but often does not exist for presidential elections.
Issue salience is a major determinant in voters' decisions. Candidates and political parties campaign to shift salience to their advantage - a process termed priming. We study the dynamics, strategies and equilibria of campaign spending for voter priming in multi-issue multi-party settings. We consider both parliamentary elections, where parties aim to maximize their share of votes, and various settings for presidential elections, where the winner takes all. For parliamentary elections, we show that pure equilibrium spending always exists and can be computed in time linear in the number of voters. For two parties and all settings, a spending equilibrium exists such that each party invests only in a single issue, and an equilibrium can be computed in time that is polynomial in the number of issues and linear in the number of voters. We also show that in most presidential settings no equilibrium exists. Additional properties of optimal campaign strategies are also studied.