Hotelling–Downs Competition with Free Entry When Voters Have an Option to Contest

Osborne shows that for almost all distributions of voters’ preferences, a pure strategy Nash equilibrium does not exist in the classical Hotelling–Downs model of electoral competition with free entry. We show that equilibrium is generically possible if in addition one allows voters an option to announce their candidacy to compete side‐by‐side with office‐seeking players. The model studied in this paper renders Osborne and the celebrated citizen‐candidate model à la Osborne and Slivinski as two extreme cases. We characterize the equilibrium set with two central questions: (i) can there be equilibria where only voters contest? and (ii) are equilibria with contesting office‐seeking players possible? We also show that in our general setting, extremists are typically voter‐candidates so that in every two‐party contest, office‐seeking politicians stay out of competition.     

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.     

Candidates’ Education and Turnout: Evidence from Italian Municipal Elections

We analyze the impact that the educational level of candidates running for the position of mayor has on electoral turnout by using a large dataset for Italian municipal elections held between 1993 and 2011. We firstly estimate a municipality fixed effects model and show that the median education of candidates standing in an election is positively correlated with turnout. To handle endogeneity issues arising from the unobservable time variant features of electoral races, we build on the literature which shows that politicians’ educational level is positively affected by their wage and apply a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design on the basis of the fact that the wages of mayors in Italy increase non‐monotonically at different thresholds. Results show that an exogenous increase in the median educational level of candidates, induced by a higher wage, leads to an increase in turnout of about 1 percentage point.     

Campaign spending limits,incumbent spending,and election outcomes

Abstract. We study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in Canadian federal elections. We first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates. We then use this information to produce endogeneity‐corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares. Furthermore, we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of electoral outcomes, finding that larger limits lead to less close elections, fewer candidates, and lower voter turnout.     

Political Motivations

Are politicians motivated by policy outcomes or by the perks of office? To shed light on this important question, I develop a simple model of two candidate electoral competitions in which candidates may be either office or policy motivated . In a second departure from standard formulations, the model incorporates both campaign and post-election behaviour of candidates. In this environment, I find that office-motivated candidates are favoured in electoral competition but that their advantage is limited by the electoral mechanism itself and policy-motivated candidates win a significant fraction of elections. More importantly, I show that the competitive interaction among candidates of different motivations affects the incentives of all candidates—both office and policy motivated—and that this competition affects policy outcomes. I also extend the model to explore the decision of citizens to enter politics and show that in all equilibria policy-motivated citizens compose a majority of the candidate pool.     

Coattails and the forces that drive them: Evidence from Mexico

Coattails and the forces behind them have important implications for the understanding of electoral processes and their outcomes. By focusing our attention on neighboring electoral sections that face the same local congressional election, but different municipal elections, and assuming that political preferences for local legislative candidates remain constant across neighboring electoral sections, we exploit variation in the strength of the municipal candidates in each of these electoral sections to estimate coattails from municipal to local congressional elections in Mexico. A one percentage increase in vote share for a municipal candidate translates, depending on his or her party, into an average of between 0.45 and 0.78 percentage point increase in vote share for the legislative candidates from the same party (though this effect may not have been sufficient to affect an outcome in any electoral district in our sample). In addition, we find that a large fraction of the effect is driven by individuals switching their vote decision in the legislative election, rather than by an increase in turnout.     

A NOTE ON NEGATIVE ELECTORAL ADVERTISING: DENIGRATING CHARACTER VS. PORTRAYING EXTREMISM

In this expository note, we extend the model of Harrington and Hess (1996) by incorporating valence advertising. There is a two‐candidate electoral contest. Candidates inherit a certain position indicating their ideological platform in an unidimensional policy space. They also inherit a certain valence index which is a comprehensive term for personal traits that are desirable to all voters such as integrity. The candidates can subsequently influence these using negative advertising with regard to both ideological and valence factors. We find that when the available resources are sufficiently small and certain reasonable assumptions are fulfilled, the candidate with the higher initial valence index will run a relatively personal campaign while the candidate with the lower initial valence index will run an ideological campaign.     

Existence and Uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium in Electoral Competition Games: The Hybrid Case

This paper analyzes the traditional unidimensional, two‐party electoral competition game when parties have mixed motivations, in the sense that they are interested in winning the election, but also in the policy implemented after the contest. In spite of having discontinuous payoffs, this game, referred to as the hybrid election game, is shown to be payoff secure and reciprocally upper semi‐continuous. Conditional payoffs, however, are not quasi‐concave. Hence, the existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium (psne ) is ensured only if parties have homogenous interests in power. In that case, an equilibrium not only exists, but it is also unique. Instead, if parties have heterogeneous motivations, depending upon the relationship between the electoral uncertainty, the aggregate opportunism, and its distribution across parties, a psne may or may not exist. The mixed extension, however, is always better reply secure. Therefore, a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium does indeed exist.     

Electoral competition with privately-informed candidates

This paper formulates and analyzes a general model of elections in which candidates receive private signals about voters' preferences prior to committing to political platforms. We fully characterize the unique pure-strategy equilibrium: After receiving her signal, each candidate locates at the median of the distribution of the median voter's location, conditional on the other candidate receiving the same signal. Sufficient conditions for the existence of pure strategy equilibrium are provided. Though the electoral game exhibits discontinuous payoffs for the candidates, we prove that mixed strategy equilibria exist generally, that equilibrium expected payoffs are continuous in the parameters of the model, and that mixed strategy equilibria are upper hemicontinuous. This allows us to study the robustness of the median voter theorem to private information: Pure strategy equilibria may fail to exist in models “close” to the Downsian model, but mixed strategy equilibria must, and they will be “close” to the Downsian equilibrium.     

Elections,Information, and State‐Dependent Candidate Quality

The quality of political candidates often depends on the current state of the world, for example because their personal characteristics are more valuable in some situations than in others. We explore the implications of state‐dependent candidate quality in a model of electoral competition where voters are uncertain about the state. Candidates are fully informed and completely office‐motivated. With a reasonable restriction on voters' beliefs, an equilibrium where candidates' positions reveal the true state does not exist. Nonrevealing equilibria always exist. Some main findings are that candidates' positions can diverge more in equilibrium when they differ more in state‐dependent quality and when the electorate is less well informed.     

Elimination contests with collusive team players

We consider a standard two-stage elimination (Tullock) contest where multiple (team) players can perfectly and publicly collude with each other throughout. We analyze and compare equilibrium outcomes under various seedings where the collusive players meet or are separated in the group stage. We identify the impact of collusion on the contest organizer and non-collusive players, as well as the organizer's optimal seeding. We find that collusion, while always undermining fairness of the competition, can hurt or benefit the organizer, depending on the discriminatory powers of the two stages. We also discuss issues such as sequential group-stage competitions, comparison between the elimination contest and the corresponding one-shot contest, secret collusion, and large discriminatory powers.     

Political activism and polarization

I develop a model of activism and polarization in the context of electoral competition. Two candidates simultaneously announce policy platforms and seek the support of ideologically inclined activists. Activists compete to influence electoral outcomes by expending costly support for their respective candidates. The presence of activists always moderates the platform choice of candidates, compared to the case of no activism. The central finding of the paper is that the relationship between partisanship of activists and polarization is ambiguous. As activists become increasingly partisan, polarization of candidate platforms reduces or widens depending on the costs of activism. I present normative conditions under which the presence of activism and increased partisanship among activists are both welfare‐improving for voters. Finally, introducing a public funding option for candidates increases polarization in the political process.     

Voting Equilibria in Multi-candidate Elections

We consider a general plurality voting game with multiple candidates, where voter preferences over candidates are exogenously given. In particular, we allow for arbitrary voter indifferences, as may arise in voting subgames of citizen-candidate or locational models of elections. We prove that the voting game admits pure strategy equilibria in undominated strategies. The proof is constructive: we exhibit an algorithm, the "best winning deviation" algorithm, that produces such an equilibrium in finite time. A byproduct of the algorithm is a simple story for how voters might learn to coordinate on such an equilibrium.     

Voting by Successive Elimination and Strategic Candidacy

We study the impact of strategic choices of self-interested candidates of whether or not to enter an election. We focus on strategic candidacy in the context of the tree and binary voting procedures used by small groups such as committees. We offer a comprehensive analysis for the special but important case of voting by successive elimination. Strategic candidacy slightly enlarges the set of candidates that can be equilibrium outcomes relative to the traditional analysis which takes the set of candidates as fixed. Pareto-dominated candidates can be elected in equilibrium under voting by successive elimination when strategic candidacy is considered, in contrast with a fixed set of candidates. Journal of Economic Litterature Classification Numbers: D71, D72.     

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.     

CANDIDATE VALENCE: EVIDENCE FROM CONSECUTIVE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS*

This article develops and estimates a dynamic spatial model of voting. The distribution of voters' policy positions and candidates' valence are recovered using individual‐level data on voting decisions in two consecutive presidential elections. The estimated model is used to provide an equilibrium interpretation of observed individual voting profiles and aggregate electoral outcomes as well as to conduct counterfactual experiments that assess the impact of candidates' policy positions, valence, and voters' information on electoral outcomes.     

Delegation and polarization of platforms in political competition

Summary. We consider a model of political competition among two ideological parties who are uncertain about the distribution of voters. The distinguishing feature of the model is that parties can delegate electoral decisions to candidates by nomination. It is shown that if the credible platform commitments of the candidates is feasible, then at least one of the parties nominates in equilibrium to a candidate who has an ideology that is more radical than the delegating party's ideology. In a variety of circumstances, this, in turn, yields a polarization of equilibrium policy choices of the candidates. It is thus argued formally here that strategic nomination of the candidates may well be one of the major reasons behind the well documented observation that the platforms associated with the political parties in two-party democracies are often surprisingly polarized. Received: January 10, 2002; revised version: May 8, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" We thank Alberto Alesina, Levent Ko?kesen, Antonio Merlo, Ronny Razin, Vijay Krishna, Alessandro Lizzeri, and seminar participants at Alicante, Columbia, Copenhagen, and NYU for helpful comments. We also thank an anonymous referee for its useful suggestions. A good fraction of this research was conducted while Ok was a visitor in the Department of Economics at University of Alicante; he thanks for the kind hospitality of this institution. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grant CICYT BEC2001-0535 (Faulí-Oller) and BEC2001-0980 (Ortu?o-Ortín). Correspondence to:I. Ortu?o-Ortin     

On Norms and Coordination Games: A Rent–Seeking Approach

The aim of this paper is to extend the rent–seeking literature to the equilibrium selection problem in competitive coordination games, i.e., games in which more than one equilibrium exists, and individuals' preferences are opposed. We analyze alternative correlated equilibria: contractual agreements and legally enforced equilibria. The latter are to be understood as the outcome of rents–seeking contests in which players invest resources in order to set a norm. The contest is analyzed in its basic two–person setting and later generalized to the two–populations case. There we show that the outcomes depend on the relative payoff structure of the game, the technological properties of the contest, and the population distribution. Finally, the efficiency analysis focuses not only on the extent of the rent dissipation, but also on the comparative analysis of the inefficiencies that arise in the market (not coordinated) equilibrium.     

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)     

Nonconvergent Electoral Equilibria under Scoring Rules: Beyond Plurality

We use Hotelling's spatial model of competition to investigate the position‐taking behavior of political candidates under a class of electoral systems known as scoring rules, though the model also has a natural interpretation in the firm location context. Candidates choose ideological positions so as to maximize their support in society. Convergent Nash equilibria in which all candidates adopt the same policy were characterized by Cox (1987). Here, we investigate nonconvergent equilibria, where candidates adopt divergent policies. We identify a number of classes of scoring rules exhibiting a range of different equilibrium properties. For some of these, nonconvergent equilibria do not exist. For others, nonconvergent equilibria in which candidates cluster at positions spread across the issue space are observed. In particular, we prove that the class of convex rules does not have Nash equilibria (convergent or nonconvergent) with the exception of some derivatives of Borda rule. We also look at “two‐party” equilibria. Implications for the firm location model are discussed.