Electoral poaching and party identification

Parteienzugehörigkeit und Wilderei beim Wahlgegner

Dan Kovenock and Brian Roberson

Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Processes and Governance from WZB Berlin Social Science Center

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 political polarization.

Date: 2005
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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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:zbw:wzbmpg:spii200517

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