Partisan politics: parties, primaries and elections

Agustin Casas ()

UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía

Abstract: Parties' candidates are chosen by different nomination rules. Recent empirical evidence shows that these rules influence the attributes of the nominees; for instance, open primaries in the U.S. choose more extreme candidates than closed primaries. Despite this evidence, the literature does not provide an explanation of why appealing to a more moderate electorate -as during open primariesresults in more extreme candidates. I build a model that shows that open primaries elect \predictable extremists", while, for instance, party leaders would chose \moderate mavericks". I obtain these results through a model that puts together 3 pieces of partisan politics: affiliation decisions, nomination rules, and an observed endogenous valence, which (together with party membership) signals the candidates' ideologies. Moreover, I investigate the welfare implications of three methods: nomination by the party leader, by closed primaries, and by open primaries. I show the conditions under which nomination by party leaders leads to higher social welfare than nomination by open primaries. Furthermore, I show that higher screening by parties, leads to more ideologically uncertain candidates. In sum, I argue that party affiliation decisions, and endogenous valence play a large role in understanding the effects of nomination rules on the political equilibria.

Date: 2013-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... 487d87127b6b/content (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cte:werepe:we1315

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in UC3M Working papers. Economics from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Economía
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().