Politics, Persuasion and Choice

Abstract

In the past decade, we have seen a certain convergence between politics and marketing, in sometimes unexpected ways. Political campaigns now routinely use marketing tools to persuade voters. Brands, on the other hand, are engaging with increasing likelihood with explicitly-political movements of interest to their customers. Moreover, both fields have long had an ambivalent relationship with the concept of truth and, as a result, we typically observe significant variation across individuals’ beliefs over optimal choices. In this paper, we report on, summarize, and extend our discussions at the 2019 Choice Symposium in which our session had diverse representation from marketing, economics and practice. We organize our ideas around three dimensions of political beliefs: 1) What are the characteristics of political beliefs?, 2) Who drives beliefs in the political setting and how? 3) What mechanisms facilitate truthful outcomes?

Keywords: Politics, Persuasion, Marketing, Choice

JEL Classification: M31, M37, M38, H50