Political Competition between Differentiated Candidates

Stefan Krasa and Mattias K Polborn

No 2560, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We introduce a framework of electoral competition in which voters have general preferences over candidates’ characteristics and policies. Candidates’ immutable characteristics (such as gender, race or previously committed policy positions) are exogenously differentiated, while candidates can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. Voters have general preferences over the vectors of candidate characteristics and policies, and vote sincerely. Candidates are uncertain about the distribution of voter preferences. We characterize a condition on voter preferences (satisfied in most existing models) under which candidates’ equilibrium policies generically converge. In contrast, for voter preferences that violate this condition, we construct a class of models in which policy divergence arises in the unique and strict Nash equilibrium. As a normative criterion, we define competition-efficiency and provide conditions under which the equilibrium is or is not competition-efficient.

Keywords: multidimensional policy; voting; issue ownership; normative analysis of political competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D60 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp2560.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Political competition between differentiated candidates (2012)
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:ces:ceswps:_2560

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().