Zusammenfassung
Recent political campaigns have demonstrated how technologies are used
to boost election outcomes by microtargeting voters. We propose and
analyze a framework which analyzes how political activists can use
technologies to target voters. Voters are represented as nodes of a
network. Political activists reach out locally to voters and try to
convince them. Depending on their technological advantage and budget,
political activists target certain regions in the network where their
activities are able to generate the largest vote-share gains.
Analytically and numerically, we quantify vote-share gains and savings
in terms of budget and number of activists from employing superior
targeting technologies compared to traditional campaigns. Moreover, we
demonstrate that the technological precision must surpass a certain
threshold in order to lead to a vote-share gain or budget advantage.
Finally, by calibrating the technology parameters to the recent U.S.
presidential election, we show that a pure targeting technology
advantage is consistent with Trump winning against Clinton. (C) 2019
Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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