False Alarm? Terror Alerts and Reelection

Roland Hodler, Simon Loertscher () and Dominic Rohner ()

No 995, Department of Economics - Working Papers Series from The University of Melbourne

Abstract: We study a game with asymmetric information to analyze whether an incumbent can improve his reelection prospects using distorted terror alerts. The voters’ preferred candidate depends on the true terror threat level, and the voters are rational and therefore aware of the incumbent’s incentive to distort alerts. In equilibrium, a moderately “Machiavellian” incumbent reports low and high threat levels truthfully, but issues the same distorted alert for a range of intermediate threat levels. He thereby ensures his reelection for some threat levels at which he would not be reelected under full information.

Keywords: Terror alerts; voting and elections; signalling; political economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 C72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-pol
Date: Written
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