EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Reputation and Rhetoric in Elections

Enriqueta Aragones, Thomas Palfrey and Andrew Postlewaite

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: We analyze conditions under which campaign rhetoric may affect the beliefs of the voters over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze an equilibrium in which voters' strategies involve a credible threat to punish candidates who renege of their campaign promises, and all campaign promises are believed by voters, and honored by candidates. We obtain that the degree to which promises are credible in equilibrium is an increasing function of the value of a candidate's reputation. We also show how the model can be extended so that rhetoric also signals candidate quality.

Keywords: Repeated Elections; Commitment; Reputation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2005-04-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/file ... ng-papers/05-021.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Reputation and Rhetoric in Elections (2005) Downloads
Working Paper: Reputation and Rhetoric in Elections (2005) Downloads
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:pen:papers:05-021

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Administrator ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:pen:papers:05-021