Reputation and Rhetoric in Elections

Enriqueta Aragones, Thomas Palfrey and Andrew Postlewaite

No 236, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We analyze conditions under which campaign rhetoric may affect the beliefs of the voters over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze an equilibrium in which voters' strategies involve a credible threat to punish candidates who renege of their campaign promises, and all campaign promises are believed by voters, and honored by candidates. We characterize the maximal credible campaign promises and obtain that the degree to which promises are credible in equilibrium is an increasing function of the value of a candidate's reputation.

Date: 2005-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.barcelonagse.eu/sites/default/files/working_paper_pdfs/236.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Reputation and Rhetoric in Elections (2005)
Working Paper: Reputation and Rhetoric in Elections (2005)
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:bge:wpaper:236

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().