Elections with privately informed parties and voters

This paper studies a situation in which parties are better informed than vo ters about the optimal policies for voters. We show that voters are able to infer the parties' information by observing their electoral positions, eve n if parties have policy preferences which differ substantially from the me dian voter's. Unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions, we assu me that voters have some private information of their own. If the informati on available to voters is biased, parties' attempts to influence voters' be liefs will result in less than full convergence even if parties know with c ertainty the optimal policy for the median voter.