Flip-flopping from primaries to general elections

I consider a model in which candidates must win a primary election to compete in the general election. Candidates may choose different policies in the primary and the general election, but doing so results in accusations of flip-flopping. I show that candidates adopt extreme policies in the primaries but then try to move closer to the center for the general election even though primary voters are forward-looking and anticipate this policy moderation. The extent to which candidates move closer to the center is constrained by flip-flopping costs, and candidates choose divergent policies in the general election. I obtain comparative statics results on candidate policy choices in terms of voter preferences.     

SEQUENTIAL VOTING WHEN LONG ELECTIONS ARE COSTLY

This paper analyzes sequential voting in binary elections when voters are motivated by a desire both to elect their preferred candidate and to avoid a long and costly election. I find a unique equilibrium in which a voter's action depends both on the intensity of the voter's preferences as well as how well the candidates have done in earlier voting rounds. This equilibrium results in momentum in which voters are more likely to vote for the candidate currently in the lead. Furthermore, the probability a voter votes for a candidate is increasing in the size of the candidate's lead. As a consequence, a candidate is more likely to win the election if the candidate's stronger supporters vote earlier in the election.     

Partisan politics and election failure with ignorant voters

We analyze candidate competition when some voters do not observe a candidate's policy choice. Voters have a personality preference when both candidates offer the same policy. In equilibrium, the candidate with a personality advantage may get elected with a partisan policy even though his opponent's policy is preferred by all voters. The departure from the Downsian prediction is most pronounced when candidates have a weak policy preference and care mostly about winning the election. In that case, uninformed voters choose the candidate with the preferred personality even if electing this candidate implies a lower payoff on average.     

Abstention and signaling in large repeated elections

I consider a two period model of repeated elections in which politicians update their beliefs about the preferences of the voters after the first period election and set second period policies accordingly. When voting is costless, a positive fraction of voters abstains for any finite population, but abstention vanishes in the limit of an arbitrarily large election. I demonstrate that in large elections, a single vote changes second period policies by an amount exponentially large compared to the probability of influencing the first period election if the probabilities with which voters vote for the two candidates differ. Using this, I prove that the limiting voting behavior in the first election is independent of the first period policy choices of the candidates. The incentive to vote to signal oneʼs preferences thus dominates the incentive to vote to increase the chances of electing oneʼs preferred candidate.     

Decisiveness of contributors’ perceptions in elections

We consider a model of two-candidate elections with a one-dimensional policy space. Spending on campaign advertisements can directly influence voters’ preferences, and contributors give the money for campaign spending in exchange for promised services if the candidate wins. We find that the winner of the election depends crucially on the contributors’ beliefs about who is likely to win and the contribution market tends toward nonsymmetric equilibria in which one of the two candidates has no chance of winning. If the voters are only weakly influenced by advertising or if permissible campaign spending is small, then the candidates choose policies close to the median voter’s ideal point, but the contributors still determine the winner. Uncertainty about the Condorcet winning point (or its nonexistence) can change these results and generate equilibria in which both candidates have substantial probabilities of winning.     

Believers vs. deniers: Climate change and environmental policy polarization

This paper theoretically studies the consequences of partisanship with an application to environmental policy. We model an election between a right-wing and a left-wing candidate who strategically propose environmental policies to gain the support of an electorate divided based on their climate change beliefs and productive assets. While environmental regulations imply a trade-off between a more sustainable environment and higher incomes for all voters, climate change believers have a higher belief in human activity-induced climate change, which translates into greater expected environmental benefits from policy, and high-asset voters care relatively more about mitigating economic costs. Voters view the left-wing candidate as more effective in addressing environmental challenges, whereas her right-wing opponent is the better candidate to deliver relief from the economic burden of regulations. In equilibrium, there exists policy divergence and the right-wing candidate always proposes the more pro-industry policy. We find that higher asset inequality moves equilibrium policies in a pro-industry direction as long as high-asset voters are ideologically more homogeneous than low-asset ones. Equilibrium policies become further polarized with greater partisanship as those voters with the same climate change belief hold similar ideologies.     

Impact of electoral competition,swing voters and interest groups on equilibrium policy platforms: Exploring the strategic forces at work

This paper constructs a stylized model of election between two opportunistic candidates who can influence equilibrium policy platforms in exchange for monetary contributions provided by two distinct lobby groups. Two key features are embedded which give rise to a dual uncertainty in the model: the existence of partisan spread across voter groups as well as the embezzlement of campaign funds received by the electoral candidates from the interest groups. We derive and compare the equilibrium platforms of the two office-seeking candidates in three scenarios: none of the above uncertainties exist (benchmark case), only uncertainty about voters’ preferences exist (swing-voter case), and both the uncertainties exist (swing voters and lobby groups case). We find that an opportunistic candidate’s swing-voter tax platform is always lower than the benchmark tax platform. Additionally, the equilibrium tax choice of electoral contenders in the swing voters and opposing lobby groups case is found to be greater than the tax level chosen under the swing-voter case if the lobby group advocating a greater level of tax is sufficiently well-organized such that it outweighs the relative swing-voter effect in that group. Furthermore, we find that when an electoral candidate transitions from being highly corrupt to becoming relatively more honest, the equilibrium level of public good provision adjusts in conformity with the well-organized group’s economic preferences. Finally, if the strength of relative lobbying effect is weaker, a lower partisan bias within that group induces an electoral candidate to choose a tax platform closer to that group’s policy bliss point.     

Mixed Equilibrium in a Downsian Model with a Favored Candidate

This paper examines competition in the standard one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections, but where one candidate (A) enjoys an advantage over the other candidate (D). Voters' preferences are Euclidean, but any voter will vote for candidate A over candidate D unless D is closer to her ideal point by some fixed distance δ. The location of the median voter's ideal point is uncertain, and its distribution is commonly known by both candidates. The candidates simultaneously choose locations to maximize the probability of victory. Pure strategy equilibria often fail to exist in this model, except under special conditions about δ and the distribution of the median ideal point. We solve for the essentially unique symmetric mixed equilibrium with no-gaps, show that candidate A adopts more moderate policies than candidate D, and obtain some comparative statics results about the probability of victory and the expected distance between the two candidates' policies. We find that both players' equilibrium strategies converge to the expected median voter as A's advantage shrinks to 0. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D72.     

Private polling in elections and voter welfare

We study elections in which two candidates poll voters about their preferred policies before taking policy positions. In the essentially unique equilibrium, candidates who receive moderate signals adopt more extreme platforms than their information suggests, but candidates with more extreme signals may moderate their platforms. Policy convergence does not maximize voters' welfare. Although candidates' platforms diverge in equilibrium, they do not do so as much as voters would like. We find that the electorate always prefers less correlation in candidate signals, and thus private over public polling. Some noise in the polling technology raises voters' welfare.     

Informational roles of pre-election polls

This paper introduces a pre-election polling stage to Feddersen and Pesendorfer's two-candidate election model in which some voters are uncertain about the state of the world. While Feddersen and Pesendorfer find that less informed, indifferent voters strictly prefer abstention, which they refer to as the swing voter's curse, I show that there exists an equilibrium in which everyone truthfully reveals his or her preference in the pre-election poll and participates in voting. Moreover, even in the truth-telling equilibrium, the candidate who leads in the poll may lose the election. However, polls can help elections aggregate information more successfully.     

INFORMATION AND THE BEAUTY PREMIUM IN POLITICAL ELECTIONS

We use data on 800 candidates from the 2012 U.S. election cycle in U.S. and state congressional races to examine the degree to which beauty affects electoral outcomes. We find that a candidate that is one standard deviation more beautiful receives a 1.1 percentage point higher vote share and is 6.0 percentage points more likely to win the election. This beauty premium is larger in situations where voters are less likely to have more information about the candidate. The beauty premium is much smaller for U.S. congressional races than for state congressional races, and is also much smaller for incumbent candidates. In addition, we find a correlation that the beauty premium is lower when a candidate spends more money on the election. (JEL D72, J70)     

Citizen-candidates,lobbies, and strategic campaigning

We study a spatial model of political competition in which potential candidates need a fixed amount of money from lobbies to enter an election. We show that the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria in which lobbies finance candidates whose policies they prefer among the set of entrants coincides with the set of Nash equilibria with weakly less than two entering candidates. Fixing lobbies’ preferences, if the total amount of money held by lobbies is finite, there exists some minimal distance between the two candidates’ positions. This minimal distance is a bound for all such Nash equilibria and is independent of the distribution of voters’ preferences. I would like to thank John Duggan, Al Slivinski, and William Thomson for useful comments and suggestions. Dan Kovenock and two anonymous referees also provided detailed comments and pointed out several errors. All errors are my own.     

Party-bosses vs. party-primaries: Quality of legislature under different selectorates

We compare the legislature quality under an exclusive, centralized selectorate (such as a party-principal) with that under an inclusive, decentralized selectorate (such as a party-primary). In our model, two parties compete over three districts: two are home districts of each party while the third is a battleground district characterized by weaker and uncertain policy preferences. We find that when home districts are “safe,” and the parties' candidate pools are of comparable quality, an equilibrium legislature under party-primaries is always of higher quality than an equilibrium legislature under party-principals. When we extend the model to include a general number of districts with candidates of only high or low quality, we show that, as long as there are not too few nor too many highest-quality candidates, party-primaries still perform better than party-principals.     

Partially Binding Platforms: Campaign Promises vis‐à‐vis Cost of Betrayal

This study examines and models the effects of partially binding campaign platforms in a political competition. Here, a candidate who implements a policy that differs from the platform must pay a cost of betrayal, which increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also analyse endogenous decisions by citizens to run for an election. In particular, the model is able to show two implications that previous frameworks have had difficulty with. First, candidates with different characteristics have different probabilities of winning an election. Second, even knowing that he/she will lose an election, a candidate will still run, hoping to make an opponent's policy approach his/her own policy.     

Primaries and the New Hampshire Effect

Candidates for U.S. presidential elections are determined through sequential elections in single states, the primaries. We develop a model in which candidates can influence their winning probability in electoral districts by spending money on campaigning. The equilibrium replicates several stylized facts very well: Campaigning is very intensive in the first district. The outcome of the first election then creates an asymmetry in the candidates' incentives to campaign in the next district, which endogenously increases the equilibrium probability that the first winner wins in further districts.On the normative side, our model offers a possible explanation for the sequential organization: It leads (in expectation) to a lower level of advertising expenditures than simultaneous elections. Moreover, if one of the candidates is the more effective campaigner, sequential elections also perform better with regard to the selection of the best candidate.     

Information Manipulation in Election Campaigns

We provide a game‐theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a Bayesian voter. The latter is uncertain about how good the candidates are. Candidates take unobservable, costly actions to manipulate voter's opinion about their positions. We show that if the candidates differ in campaigning efficiency, and the voter receives the biased campaign messages with some noise, then the cost‐efficient candidate can win the election with higher probability than her opponent even when she is ex‐post an inferior choice for the voter. Our paper offers a novel informational justification for imposing limits on campaign spending and encouraging diversity in the supply of political information.     

The sources of protectionist drift in representative democracies

We analyze a two country-two good model of international trade in which citizens in each country differ by their specific factor endowments. The trade policy in each country is set by the politician who has been elected by the citizens in a previous stage. Due to a delegation effect citizens generally favor candidates who are more protectionist than they are. The one-candidate-per-country equilibria exhibit a “protectionist drift” owing to this delegation effect. In addition, we find an additional source of protectionist drift that we call the “abstention effect”. Not only do candidates wish to delegate to more protectionist colleagues, but these more protectionist colleagues who can win election, prefer still more protectionist candidates than themselves. Therefore, they have an incentive to abstain, that is, not run for election. We show that because of this abstention effect there exists a range of electable citizens all of whom are more protectionist than the median voter's most preferred candidate. We extend the analysis allowing two-candidate equilibria and the possibility that there are costs and benefits of holding office.     

INFLUENCE, ELECTIONS, AND THE VALUE OF A VOTE IN THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

This paper investigates the extent to which interest groups use their campaign contributions to affect election outcomes as opposed to influencing candidate policy choices directly. It also reveals how much value interest groups place on gaining one more favorable vote in the House of Representatives. The empirical estimates suggest that gaining influence dominates helping favored candidates win the election as a means to affect defense spending policies. Political action committees differ in interesting ways, however, with the more ideological peace groups placing greater emphasis on changing electoral outcomes than do investor lobbies representing the defense industry.     

Strategic candidacy for multivalued voting procedures

Dutta et al. (Econometrica 69 (2001) 1013) (Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton—DJLeB) initiate the study of manipulation of voting procedures by a candidate who withdraws from the election. A voting procedure is candidate stable if this is never possible. We extend the DJLeB framework by allowing: (a) the outcome of the procedure to be a set of candidates; (b) some or all of the voters to have weak preference orderings of the candidates. When there are at least three candidates, any strongly candidate stable voting selection satisfying a weak unanimity condition is characterized by a serial dictatorship. This result generalizes Theorem 4 of DJLeB.     

Manipulation through political endorsements

We study elections with three candidates under plurality voting. A candidate is a Condorcet loser if the majority of the voters place that candidate at the bottom of their preference rankings. We first show that a Condorcet loser might win the election in a three-way race. Next we introduce to the model an endorser who has private information about the true probability distribution of the preferences of the voters. Observable endorsements facilitate coordination among voters who may otherwise split their votes and lead to the victory of the Condorcet loser. When the endorser has an ideological bias towards one of the candidates, the coordination impact of endorsements remains unaltered, moreover the endorser successfully manipulates the outcome of the election in favor of his bias, even if his ideological bias is known by the voters. The results are true for any endorsement cost and any magnitude of bias as long as the electorate is large enough.