Cheryl Boudreau and Mathew D. McCubbins (University of California, San Diego - Political Science and University of California at San Diego) have posted From Competition to Competence? Theory and Experiments Regarding Deliberation and Citizen Learning on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Many scholars propose deliberation as a remedy for our politically uninformed citizenry. Specifically, these scholars emphasize that bringing citizens together, exposing them to the views of competing experts and politicians, and then letting them discuss those views among themselves will help citizens to learn about politics and develop more informed opinions about particular policy issues. In this paper, we analyze whether and under what conditions competition between experts reveals truthful information and enables citizens to make informed choices. Specifically, we develop a formal model of a communication game between two competing experts and a citizen, and we test our model's predictions experimentally. The results of our model and experiments demonstrate that competition 1) does not necessarily induce both experts to send truthful signals to the citizen, 2) prevents the citizen from learning from the experts' signals, and 3) only induces truthful signals and enables the citizen to learn once it is combined with institutions, such as a penalty for lying or a threat of verification.
Highly recommended!
