Reciprocity and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model where a left-wing and a right-wing political party are solely interested in the policies they pursue. We assume that voters display reciprocal behavior. By contrast, political parties are not motivated by reciprocity. We show that reciprocity may have dramatic consequences for models of voting behavior. The incentive to be kind to the median voter may ensure that a position closer to the median voter's position is adopted even if political parties are not directly interested in being elected and cannot commit to a political stance during an election campaign. Moreover, reciprocity increases incumbency advantages.     

Reciprocity and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model where a left-wing and a right-wing political party are solely interested in the policies they pursue. We assume that voters display reciprocal behavior. By contrast, political parties are not motivated by reciprocity. We show that reciprocity may have dramatic consequences for models of voting behavior. The incentive to be kind to the median voter may ensure that a position closer to the median voter's position is adopted even if political parties are not directly interested in being elected and cannot commit to a political stance during an election campaign. Moreover, reciprocity increases incumbency advantages.     

Neighbors and friends: How do European political parties respond to globalization?

This paper explores the relationship between globalization and party positions accounting for potential differences between left- and right-wing parties. The analysis is based on a panel model of 36 political parties in 18 Western European countries between 1970 and 2015. We find that right-wing parties move leftward in response to globalization, while left-wing parties do not alter their position. Additionally, we find that ideological party positions are affected by foreign parties’ positions of the same ideological bloc. These findings indicate that there is a convergence towards the left of the political spectrum due to right-wing party moderation.     

A model of political parties

This paper presents a new model of political parties. I assume that the role of parties is to increase the commitment ability of politicians vis-à-vis the voters. Whereas a politician running alone can only offer his ideal policy, the set of policies that a party can commit to is the Pareto set of its members. I show that the commitment mechanisms provided by the institution of parties has no effect when the policy space is unidimensional; the policies parties can induce in equilibrium arise also when politicians are running independently. However, when the policy space is multidimensional, politicians use the vehicle of parties to offer equilibrium policies that they cannot offer in their absence.     

A Spatial Theory of News Consumption and Electoral Competition

We characterize the optimal editorial positions of the media in a model in which the media influence both voting behaviour and party policies. Political parties are less likely to choose partisan policies when more voters consume informative news. When there are two media outlets, each should be slightly biased relative to its audience in order to attract voters with relatively extreme views. Voter welfare is typically higher under a duopoly than under a monopoly. Two media outlets under joint ownership may provide more diverse viewpoints than two independent ones, but voter welfare is not always higher.     

WHY DOES A TWO-PARTY SYSTEM EXIST?: A NEW ECONOMIC EXPLANATION*

The purpose of this paper is to present a new economic explanation for why a multiple-party system can endogenously arise as a result of the electoral process. The traditional view on the electoral process (i.e., the median voter theorem) is that political parties that pursue policies in the interest of the median voter are led to a convergence of policies. However, this view cannot explain why either conservative or liberal parties win election in many democratic countries. In order to explain this paradox, the following model considers an economy with three types of parties: conservative, middle, and liberal parties. In the model, the policy of each party is assumed to be time-consistent, so that the policy of the middle party generally leads to suboptimal outcomes for the majority voters. Thus, the “rational” majority voters try to elect the political party whose objective is biased. As a result, the electoral process may lead to a two-party system where both conservative and liberal parties have a chance to win election.     

Media as watchdogs: The role of news media in electoral competition

We develop an equilibrium model to analyze the role of the media in electoral competition. When policy payoffs are state-dependent, party policies do not converge to the median voter's ideal policy if the media report only party policies. News analysis about the state, though possibly biased, can discipline off-equilibrium deviations and make the parties adopt more centrist policies. Since voters are rational, the party favored by the media need not win with a higher probability. Instead, media bias may reduce the effectiveness of electoral competition and lead to more polarized policies.     

Information,polarization and term length in democracy

This paper considers term lengths in a representative democracy where the political issue divides the population on the left–right scale. Parties are ideologically different and better informed about the consequences of policies than voters are. A short term length makes the government more accountable, but the re-election incentive leads to policy distortion as the government seeks to manipulate swing voters' beliefs to make its ideology more popular. This creates a trade off: A short term length improves accountability but gives distortions. A short term length is best for swing voters when the uncertainty is large and parties are not very polarized. Partisan voters always prefer a long term length. When politicians learn while in office a long term length becomes more attractive for swing voters.     

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.     

On the benefits of party competition

We study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model in which voters have incomplete information. We first identify a novel “party competition effect” in a setting with two opposing parties. Compared with “at large” selection of candidates, party selection makes office-holders more willing to avoid extreme ideological stands, and this benefits voters of all ideologies. We then allow for additional parties. With strategic voting, citizens benefit most when the only two parties receiving votes are more moderate. With sincere voting, even with three parties, extreme parties can thrive at the expense of a middle party; and whether most citizens prefer two or three parties varies with model parameters.     

Playing for Your Own Audience: Extremism in Two‐Party Elections

This paper considers a two‐party election with a single‐dimensional policy space. We assume that each voter has a higher probability of observing the position of the party he is affiliated with than the position of the other party, an assumption that is consistent with the National Election Studies (NES) electoral data set. In equilibrium, the two parties locate away from the median, because the voters who dislike a party's platform observe its policy choice with a lower probability, and its own audience like policy choices that cater to its taste. As the asymmetry in voter information or the cost of voting increases, the parties adopt more extreme platforms, while if there are fewer extreme voters the opposite effect occurs. Making voters more symmetrically informed about the two parties' platforms increases the welfare of society, while asymmetric information acquisition by the voters is worse than no information acquisition at all.     

RETROSPECTIVE VOTING AND PARTY POLARIZATION

We provide a new and favorable perspective on voter naiveté and party polarization. We contrast sophisticated (Nash) versus retrospective voting in a model where two parties commit to policies. Retrospective voters do not understand the mapping between states and outcomes induced by a policy; instead, they simply vote for the party that delivers the highest observed performance, as determined in equilibrium. We show that parties have an incentive to polarize under retrospective, compared to Nash, voting. Moreover, this polarization often results in higher welfare due to a better match between policies and fundamentals.     

POLITICAL CYCLES

A model of elections is put forth in which there are two parties, each representing a different constituency of voters (the poor and the rich). The political issue is the choice of a proportional tax rate on income, revenues from which are used to finance a public good. There is a stochastic element in which party wins the elections, due to party uncertainty concerning voter preferences, or due to uncertainty concerning which voters will show up at the polls. A political equilibrium in one period consists in a tax policy put forth by each party, and a probability that each party wins. A long series of elections is simulated (100 periods). Voter preferences for the public good change adversely as a function of length of time the incumbent party has been in power and the level of the public good in the last period. Thus, if the party in power funds high levels of the public good, preferences start to move against the public good. This model generates dramatic political cycles, and it is argued that these cycles are of fundamentally different origin from that discussed in the realignment literature.     

So closed: Political selection in proportional systems

We analyze political selection in a closed list proportional system where parties have strong gate-keeping power, which they use as an instrument to pursue votes. Parties face a trade-off between selecting loyal candidates or experts, who are highly valued by the voters and thus increase the probability of winning the election. Voters can be rational or behavioral. The former cares about the quality mix of the elected candidates in the winning party, and hence about the ordering on the party list. The latter only concentrate on the quality type of the candidates in the top positions of the party list. Our theoretical model shows that, to persuade rational voters, parties optimally allocate loyalists to safe seats and experts to uncertain positions. Persuading behavioral voters instead requires to position the experts visibly on top of the electoral list. Our empirical analysis, which uses data from the 2013 National election in Italy—held under closed list proportional representation—and from independent pre-electoral polls, is overall supportive of voters' rational behavior. Loyalists (i.e., party officers or former members of Parliament who mostly voted along party lines) are overrepresented in safe positions, and, within both safe and uncertain positions, they are ranked higher in the list.     

Economic reform, voting, and local political intervention: Evidence from India

This paper uses the Indian tariff reforms of the early nineties to estimate how voters hurt by economic reforms respond. Regions more hurt by the tariff reform increased their support for both the party that initiated their suffering and parties with similar preferences in favor of poverty-centric policies. This response is surprisingly sophisticated, where voters did not simply punish incumbents for negative income shocks and correctly discounted initial anti-reform stances by opposition parties that later turned out to be false. Furthermore, the strength of this voting response varied with both geography and local political incentives, suggesting that the economic effects of reforms might vary substantially in large and decentralized democracies.     

Rainy day politics. An instrumental variables approach to the effect of parties on political outcomes

Scholars have grappled with the question of how parties affect policy. Here I propose and test an instrumental variable approach using rainfall. In Norwegian municipal elections, potential left wing voters are likely to abstain from voting with election day rain, whereas the opposite holds for right-wingers. Then rainfall provides an exogenous source of variation, and hence an instrument, for the party composition of the municipal council. A strengthening of the right wing parties due to rainfall shifts expenditures toward education, but reduces total spending. This also shows that political competition does not drive party platforms to converge.     

Yardstick competition to tame the Leviathan

This papers analyzes the disciplining role of elections under asymmetric information, when voters can rely on relative performance evaluation to tame a Leviathan. When elections are held in different regions, voters are able to reduce political rents below the Leviathan level by retrospective voting strategies. The paper compares a multi-candidate model with a two-party system with either independent or coordinated policies in the various jurisdictions. In general, voters prefer the multi-candidate system. However, the disciplining ability of voters under the two-party system is strengthened if each party has a uniform leadership that determines policies in all regions.     

SAFE SEATS,MARGINAL SEATS,AND PARTY PLATFORMS: THE LOGIC OF PLATFORM DIFFERENTIATION*

This paper analyzes a spatial model of two-party competition where parties are not monolithic decision makers but collections of self-motivated officeholders. Party platforms are chosen collectively by incumbent officeholders. The main result is that in a stable equilibrium party platforms do not converge to the same point. Instead, the parties choose platforms so that voters can distinguish between them, and these platforms divide the set of legislative districts cleanly along party lines. All incumbents prefer this situation to one where the platforms converge, because it improves their own chances of reelection.     

Emigrants’ missing votes

What are the causal effects of emigration on election outcomes in the country of origin? Large emigration of high-skilled emigrants can lead to changes in the distribution of political preferences, which affect voting outcomes. Using administrative migration and voting data, we show that emigration from Poland following its accession to the European Union in 2004 caused an increase in vote shares for right-wing parties, while decreasing the vote share for left-wing parties due to emigrants’ missing left-leaning votes. To account for endogenous migration patterns, we construct an innovative instrument that measures the distance to the closest open EU border. Our results highlight that emigration enhances stayers’ trust in right-wing governments and increases stayers’ voting for parties with pro-European positions. Exploiting a change in voting rules over time allows to disentangle different mechanisms. These results have important implications for the design of voting policies.     

Extremism, campaigning and ambiguity

This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. Each party has a predetermined ideology drawn from some distribution. Parties choose a platform and campaign to inform voters about the platform. We find that, the farther away parties are from each other (on average), the less resources are spent on campaigning (on average). Thus, if parties are extreme, less information is supplied than if parties are moderate. We also show that if a public subsidy is introduced, we have policy convergence, given some mild technical restrictions on the public subsidy.