Ideological Dissent in Downsian Politics

Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Manaswini Bhalla (), Kalysan Chatterjee and Jaideep Roy

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: We analyze the Hotelling-Downs model of a winner-take-all elections with sequential entry where n > 2 'office-seeking' candidates with privately known qualities arrive in an order to announce platform commitments and voters receive partially informative exogenous signals about quality of each contestant. We characterize two-party equilibria when the order of entry is exogenously given. In these equilibria, entry can occur in any 'round' with positive probability: high quality candidates signal their type through showing ideological dissent with the voters while low quality ones randomize between (mis)-signaling quality through dissent and staying out. An interesting implication of this is that while the presence of a partially informative press can keep low quality candidates out of competition up to a certain degree, electoral competition improves voter's information about candidate types beyond what the press can reveal. However this endogenous mechanism of strategic information transmission leads to a political polarization. We then endogenize the order of entry to show that in general some high quality candidates enter early and others enter late while all low quality candidates either stay out or enter late. Moreover, while extremism continues to signal quality, there must be a gradual moderation in ideology although information revelation is non-monotonic in time with full revelation for early and late entrants and only partial revelation for intermediate entrants.

Keywords: Sequential entry; Unobserved quality; Stratetic dissent; Polarization; Endogenous Order (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-mic and nep-pol
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