Voting Under Salience Bias and Strategic Extremism

Günnur Ege Bilgin () and Cavit Görkem Destan ()

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: We present a model demonstrating politicians strategically adopt extreme positions even when the voters are homogeneous and moderate. We examine the behavior of voters and electoral candidates under the assumption that the salience of political issues affects voting decisions through voter preferences. Voters have limited attention, which is unintentionally captured by distinctive policies. We demonstrate that candidates who differ in their budget constraints and voters with such limited attention can account for extremist policies, even though voters are identical in their preferences. Subsequently, we examine the elections with decoy candidates unlikely to win. Even though these candidates do not attract the voters, they might still influence the election outcome by altering salience. Moreover, we provide experimental evidence that salience affects consumer preferences and election outcomes using a representative sample of Turkey's vote base.

Keywords: salience bias; extremism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C9 D72 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30
Date: 2024-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-dcm, nep-exp, nep-mic and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2024_542

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