Electoral Poaching and Party Identification

Dan Kovenock and Brian Robertson

Purdue University Economics Working Papers from Purdue University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of party strength based on the sizes and intensities of a party s loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties strengths. In equilibrium, parties target or poach a strict subset of the opposition party s loyal voters: offering those voters a high expected transfer, while freezing out the remainder with a zero transfer. The size of the subset of opposition voters frozen out and consequently, the level of inequality in utilities generated by a party s equilibrium redistribution schedule is increasing in the opposition party s strength. We also construct a measure of political polarization that is increasing in the sum and symmetry of the parties strengths, and find that the expected ex-post inequality in utilities of the implemented policy is increasing in the political polarization.

Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2005-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Electoral Poaching and Party Identification (2008)
Working Paper: Electoral poaching and party identification (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pur:prukra:1178

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