Partisan Optimism and Political Bargaining

Thomas Jensen () and Andreas Madum
Additional contact information
Andreas Madum: Department of Economics, Copenhagen University

No 14-05, Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics

Abstract: Partisan voters are optimistic about electoral outcomes: their estimates of the probability of electoral success for their party or candidate are substantially higher than the average among the electorate. This has large potential implications for political bargaining. Optimism about future electoral outcomes can make costly bargaining delay look more favorable, which may induce partisans to punish their party for agreeing to a compromise rather than waiting, for example by not turning out to vote. Therefore, party decision makers should take optimism among partisans into account when bargaining. In this paper we use game theoretic modeling to explore the implications of partisan optimism for political bargaining. We show that increased optimism among a partisan group leads to a stronger bargaining position for their party, but may hurt its electoral prospects. Another main finding is that even high levels of partisan optimism do not necessarily cause inefficient bargaining delay.

JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2014-02-06
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:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.ku.dk/english/research/publications/wp/dp_2014/1405.pdf (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:kud:kuiedp:1405

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics Oester Farimagsgade 5, Building 26, DK-1353 Copenhagen K., Denmark. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thomas Hoffmann ().