Extremism, Campaigning and Ambiguity

Andreas Westermark

No 1999:9, Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. We show existence of equilibrium under mild assumptions for an arbitrary number of parties. The main result is that if the parties are more extreme, then they spend less resources on campaigning (on average), compared with moderate parties. The reason is the following. Consider voters that are informed by one party only, say party 1. If both parties move closer to each other, then the actual and expected platform moves closer to the indifferent voters peak. By concavity of preferences, the increase in payoff of voting for the party that informed is bigger than the increase in payoff of voting for the other party. Thus, the previously indifferent voter now strictly prefers party 1. The effect makes parties gain more votes by informing when parties are moderate. Since spending increases, voters are (on average) more informed when parties are moderates.

Keywords: Political Parties; Campaigning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 D89 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 1999-05-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Games and Economic Behavior, 2004, pages 421-452.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nek.uu.se/pdf/1999wp9.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.nek.uu.se/pdf/1999wp9.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.nek.uu.se/pdf/1999wp9.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.uu.se/institution/nationalekonomiska/pdf/1999wp9.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Extremism, campaigning and ambiguity (2004)
Working Paper: Extremism, Campaigning and Ambiguity (1999)
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:hhs:uunewp:1999_009

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P. O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ulrika Öjdeby ().