Imperfectly Informed Voters and Strategic Extremism

Dimitrios Xefteris and Enriqueta Aragonès
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Enriqueta Aragones

No 725, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We analyze a unidimensional model of two-candidate electoral competition where voters have imperfect information about the candidates' policy proposals, that is, voters cannot observe the exact policy proposals of the candidates but only which candidate offers the most leftist/rightist platform. We assume that candidates are purely office motivated and that one candidate enjoys a valence advantage over the other. We characterize the unique Sequential Equilibrium in very-weakly undominated strategies of the game. In this equilibrium the behavior of the two candidates tends to maximum extremism, due to the voters' lack of information. But it may converge or diverge depending on the size of the advantage. For small values of the advantage candidates converge to the extreme policy most preferred by the median and for large values of the advantage candidates strategies diverge: each candidate specializes in a different extreme policy. These results are robust to the introduction of a proportion of well informed voters. In this case the degree of extremism decreases when the voters become more informed.

Keywords: imperfect information; Downsian model; advantaged candidate; maximum differentiation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cta, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Related works:
Journal Article: IMPERFECTLY INFORMED VOTERS AND STRATEGIC EXTREMISM (2017)
Working Paper: Imperfectly informed voters and strategic extremism (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:725

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