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)

Downloads: (external link)
https://business.purdue.edu/research/Working-papers-series/Year-2005/1178.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (https://business.purdue.edu/research/Working-papers-series/Year-2005/1178.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://business.purdue.edu/research/working-papers-series/Year-2005/1178.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Electoral Poaching and Party Identification (2008)
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:pur:prukra:1178

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Purdue University Economics Working Papers from Purdue University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Business PHD ().