Partisan politics and election failure with ignorant voters |
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Authors: | Faruk Gul |
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Institution: | Department of Economics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA |
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Abstract: | 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. |
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Keywords: | D72 |
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