Intensity valence

Fabian Gouret and Stéphane Rossignol

No 2016-07, THEMA Working Papers from THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise

Abstract: This paper studies a continuous one-dimensional spatial model of electoral competition with two office-motivated candidates differentiated by their “intensity” valence. All voters agree that one candidate will implement more intensively his announced policy than his opponent. However, and contrary to existing models, the intensity valence has a different impact on the utility of voters according to their position in the policy space. The assumption that voters have utility functions with intensity valence, an assumption which has been found to be grounded empirically, generates very different results than those obtained with traditional utility functions with additive valence. First, the candidate with low intensity valence is supported by voters whose ideal points are on both extremes of the policy space. Second, there exist pure strategy Nash equilibria in which the winner is the candidate with high intensity if the distribution of voters in the policy space is sufficiently homogeneous. On the contrary, if the distribution of voters in the policy space is very heterogeneous, there are pure strategy Nash equilibria in which the candidate with low intensity wins. For moderate heterogeneity of the distribution of voters, there is no pure strategy Nash equilibrium.

Keywords: valence; voter’s utility functions; Downsian model; spatial voting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic, nep-pol and nep-upt
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Intensity valence (2019)
Working Paper: Intensity valence (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ema:worpap:2016-07

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