The Real Swing Voter's Curse

James Robinson and Ragnar Torvik

No 14799, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A key idea in political economy is that policy is often tailored to voters who are not ideologically attached - swing voters. We show, however, that in political environments where political parties can use repression and violence to exclude voters from elections, they may optimally target the swing voters. This is because they anticipate that if they had to compete for the support of these voters, they would end up giving them a lot of policy favors. Hence in weakly institutionalized political environments swing voters are cursed rather than blessed. We illustrate the analysis with a discussion of recent political events in Zimbabwe.

JEL-codes: H1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Note: POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published as James A. Robinson & Ragnar Torvik, 2009. "The Real Swing Voter's Curse," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 99(2), pages 310-15, May.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14799.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Real Swing Voter's Curse (2009)
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:nbr:nberwo:14799

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14799

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().