Polarization and Electoral Balance

Andrea Mattozzi and David Levine

No 17538, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We study a model of electoral competition in which two politicians with different office motivations set party platforms and both politicians and grass- roots can provide electoral effort. While the underlying structure of the model is asymmetric, we show that both parties have an equal chance of winning the election. In equilibrium, however, only the most office motivated politician matters for policy polarization and welfare: a kind of Gresham’s law for politicians. The greater this office motivation, the greater is polarization and the lower is welfare. Less interest in politics means also greater polarization and lower welfare.

Keywords: Elections; Politicians; Polarization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17538 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Polarization and Electoral Balance (2023)
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:cpr:ceprdp:17538

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP17538

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().