Campaigns, political mobility, and communication

Hans Gersbach

Public Choice, 2014, vol. 161, issue 1, 49 pages

Abstract: We study the interdependence between campaign contributions, the candidates’ positions, and electoral outcomes. In our model, a candidate who moves away from his firmly established position towards a more risky one generates costs for the voters. Campaign contributions allow the candidates to reduce these mobility costs. We show that if donations were prohibited, then a unique equilibrium regarding the position choices of candidates would exist. With unrestricted financing of political campaigns, two equilibria emerge, depending on whether a majority of interest groups runs to support the leftist or rightist candidate. Interest groups may finance candidates whose position is far away from their own ideal point. The equilibria generate a variety of new features of campaign games, and may help identify the objective functions of candidates empirically. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Elections; Campaign contributions; Interest groups; Run of donors; C72; D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-013-0125-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Campaigns, Political Mobility, and Communication (2011)
Working Paper: Campaigns, Political Mobility, and Communication (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:kap:pubcho:v:161:y:2014:i:1:p:31-49

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-013-0125-3

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().