No Polarization in Spite of Primaries: A Median Voter Theorem with Competitive Nominations

Gilles Serra ()
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Gilles Serra: Center for Economics Research and Teaching (CIDE)

A chapter in The Political Economy of Governance, 2015, pp 211-229 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract It is commonly assumed that primaries induce candidates to adopt extremist positions. However the empirical evidence is mixed, so a theoretical investigation is warranted. This chapter develops a general model introducing the fundamental elements of primary elections in the well-known spatial voting model by Downs (An economic theory of democracy. Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York, 1957). In spite of significant incentives for candidates to diverge, I find the surprising result that they will all converge to the median voter’s ideal point. The result in this paper suggests that primaries are not sufficient to create polarization by themselves. Rather, for candidates to diverge from the center, other complementary features must be present. An implication is that previous formal results in the literature predicting that primaries lead to polarization probably contain other factors that must be interacting with primaries. Future research should endeavor to disentangle these factors.

Keywords: Ideal Point; Median Voter; Complete Convergence; Centripetal Force; Primary Election (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stpocp:978-3-319-15551-7_11

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-15551-7_11

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