 Partially Binding Platforms and the Advantages of Being an Extreme CandidateNo 10-E-07, IMES Discussion Paper Series from Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan Abstract: This paper develops a political-competition model in which platforms are partially binding: a candidate who implements a policy that is different from her platform must pay a cost of betrayal that increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also suppose that voters are uncertain about candidate preferences for policies. If voters believe that a candidate is likely to be extreme, there exists a semiseparating equilibrium: an extreme candidate mimics a moderate candidate with some probability, and with the remaining probability, he announces a platform that commits to the implementation of a more moderate policy. Although an extreme candidate will implement a more extreme policy than a moderate candidate in equilibrium, partial pooling ensures that voters prefer an extreme candidate who does not pretend to be moderate over an uncertain candidate announcing a moderate candidate's platform. As a result, a moderate candidate never has a higher probability of winning than an extreme one. Keywords: Electoral Competition; Campaign Promise; Signaling Game (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ime:imedps:10-e-07 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in IMES Discussion Paper Series from Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan Contact information at EDIRC. |
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