Title

Public Protests, Social Media and Policy Making

Author(s)

Marco Battaglini Marco Battaglini (Princeton University)

Abstract

We explore the limits of petitions and public protests as mechanisms to aggregate dispersed information. We show that if citizens’ signals are not sufficiently precise, information aggregation is impossible, even if the conflict with the policy-maker is small, no matter how large is the population of informed citizens. We characterize the conditions on conflict and the signal structure that guarantee information aggregation. When these conditions are satisfied, we show that full information aggregation is possible as population grows to infinity. When they are not satisfied, we show that information aggregation may still be possible if social media are available.

Creation Date

2015-04

Section URL ID

Paper Number

068_201 5

URL

http://detc.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp068_2015-revised-15Apr15_Battaglini_Public-Protests-Social-Media-and-Policy-Making.pdf

File Function

Jel

L82, D72

Keyword(s)

Suppress

false

Series

10