Keep your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during U.S. and French Elections

Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline LePennec and Vincent Pons

No 18490, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for U.S. House elections, 2002-2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958-2022. We find that candidates move to the center in ideology and rhetorical complexity between the first round (or primary) and the second round (or general election). This convergence reflects candidates’ strategic adjustment to their competitor, as predicted by the median voter theorem: Using an RDD, we show that candidates converge to the platform of opponents who narrowly qualified for the last round, as opposed to those who narrowly failed to qualify.

JEL-codes: D72 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18490 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:18490

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP18490

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().