Ideologues or Pragmatists?

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita

No 908, Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Abstract: We study a model of electoral control where the politician is a policy expert, but the voter is not. First, we focus on the case of an "ideologue," i.e., a politician who always wants the same policy Implemented regardless of the state. We show that the voter's lack of policy expertise comes at no cost to him, but may come at an electoral cost to the politician. Next, we focus on the case of a "pragmatist," I.e., a politician whose preferences are state contingent. We show that the voter's lack of policy expertise dose come at a cost to him. As a consequence, the voter may fare better with an ideologue than with a pragmatist. This can occur even if the pragmatist's preferences are arbitrarily close to perfectly correlated with the voter's.

Keywords: electoral control; ideologue; politician; pragmatist; preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/about/publication ... apers/pdf/wp0908.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to harrisschool.uchicago.edu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

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:har:wpaper:0908

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eleanor Cartelli ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).