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Economics > General Economics

arXiv:2512.04047 (econ)
[Submitted on 3 Dec 2025]

Title:Polarization by Design: How Elites Could Shape Mass Preferences
as AI Reduces Persuasion Costs

Authors:Nadav Kunievsky
View a PDF of the paper titled Polarization by Design: How Elites
Could Shape Mass Preferences as AI Reduces Persuasion Costs, by Nadav
Kunievsky
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    Abstract:In democracies, major policy decisions typically require
    some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass
    support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only
    through limited instruments like schooling and mass media;
    advances in AI-driven persuasion sharply reduce the cost and
    increase the precision of shaping public opinion, making the
    distribution of preferences itself an object of deliberate
    design. We develop a dynamic model in which elites choose how
    much to reshape the distribution of policy preferences, subject
    to persuasion costs and a majority rule constraint. With a single
    elite, any optimal intervention tends to push society toward more
    polarized opinion profiles - a ``polarization pull'' - and
    improvements in persuasion technology accelerate this drift. When
    two opposed elites alternate in power, the same technology also
    creates incentives to park society in ``semi-lock'' regions where
    opinions are more cohesive and harder for a rival to overturn, so
    advances in persuasion can either heighten or dampen polarization
    depending on the environment. Taken together, cheaper persuasion
    technologies recast polarization as a strategic instrument of
    governance rather than a purely emergent social byproduct, with
    important implications for democratic stability as AI
    capabilities advance.

Subjects:    General Economics (econ.GN); Artificial Intelligence
             (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY)
ACM classes: K.4
Cite as:     arXiv:2512.04047 [econ.GN]
             (or arXiv:2512.04047v1 [econ.GN] for this version)
             https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.04047
             Focus to learn more
             arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Nadav Kunievsky [view email]
[v1] Wed, 3 Dec 2025 18:33:26 UTC (198 KB)
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