Circumstantial power: Optimal persuadable voters

Abstract

Let us suppose that certain committee is going to decide, using some fixed voting rules, either to accept or to reject a proposal that affects your interests. From your perception about each voter’s position, you can make an a priori estimation of the probability of the proposal being accepted. Wishing to increase this probability of acceptance before the votes are cast, assume further that you are able to convince (at least) one voter to improve his/her perception in favor of the proposal. The question is: which voters should be persuaded in order to get the highest possible increase in the probability of acceptance? In other words, which are the optimal persuadable voters? To answer this question a measure of “circumstantial power” is considered in this paper, which is useful to identify optimal persuadable voters. Three preorderings in the set of voters, based on the voting rules, are defined and they are used for finding optimal persuadable voters, even in the case that only a qualitative ranking of each voter’s inclination for the proposal has been made.