Electoral Competition with Uncertainty Averse Parties

The nonexistence of equilibria in models of electoral competition involving multiple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics. In this paper, we relax the standard assumption that parties act as expected utility maximizers. We show that equilibria often exist when parties with limited knowledge about the electorate are modeled as uncertainty-averse. What is more, these equilibria can be characterized as a straightforward generalization of the classical median voter result.Uncertainty Aversion, Multiple Priors, Median Voter, Electoral Competition over many Issues

The Political Economy of Regulatory Risk

This paper investigates political uncertainty as a source of regulatory risk. It shows that political parties have incentives to reduce regulatory risk actively: Mutually beneficial pre–electoral agreements that reduce regulatory risk always exist. Agreements that fully eliminate it exist when political divergence is small or electoral uncertainty is appropriately skewed. These results follow from a fluctuation effect of regulatory risk that hurts parties and an output–expansion effect that benefits at most one party. Due to commitment problems, regulatory agencies with some degree of political independence are needed to implement pre–electoral agreements.regulation, regulatory risk, political economy, electoral uncertainty, independent regulatory agency

Optimal Districting with Endogenous Party Platforms

This paper proposes a theory of socially optimal districting in a legislative-election model with endogenous party platforms. We generalize the model of Coate and Knight (2007), allowing parties to strategically condition their platforms on the districting. The socially optimal districting re ects the ideological leaning of the population, so that parties internalize voters' preferences in their policy platforms. The optimal seat-vote curve is unbiased when voters are risk-neutral, and -contrary to previous findings-biased against the largest partisan group when voters are risk-averse. The model is then calibrated by an econometric analysis of the elections of U.S. State legislators during the 1990s.

Campaigns, Political Mobility, and Communication

We present a model of elections in which interest group donations allow candidates to shift policy positions. We show that if donations were prohibited, then a unique equilibrium regarding the position choices of candidates would exist. With unrestricted financing of political campaigns two equilibria emerge, depending on whether a majority of interest groups runs to support the leftist or rightist candidate. The equilibria generate a variety of new features of campaign games and may help identify the objective functions of candidates empirically.elections, campaign contributions, interest groups

Divergent Platforms

A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice of identical platforms depends on the following two - possibly counterfactual - assumptions: 1. Issue spaces are uni-dimensional and 2. Parties are unitary actors whose preferences can be represented by expected utility functions. The main goal here is to provide an example of a two-party model in which parties offer substantially different platforms in equilibrium even though no exogenous asymmetries are assumed. In this example, some voters’ preferences over the 2-dimensional issue space are assumed to exhibit non-convexities and parties evaluate their actions with respect to a set of beliefs on the electorate.Downs model, Games with Incomplete Preferences, Knightian Uncertainty, Uncertainty Aversion, Platform Divergence

Campaigns, Political Mobility, and Communication

We present a model of elections in which interest group donations allow candidates to shift policy positions. We show that if donations were prohibited, then a unique equilibrium regarding the platform choices of candidates would exist. Our game with financing of political campaigns exhibits two equilibria, depending on whether a majority of interest groups runs to support the leftist or rightist candidate. The equilibria generate a variety of new features of campaign games and may help identify the objective functions of candidates empirically.elections, campaign contributions, interest groups

The Political Economy of Regulatory Risk

I investigate the argument that, in a two–party system with different regulatory objectives, political uncertainty generates regulatory risk. I show that this risk has a fluctuation effect that hurts both parties and an output–expansion effect that benefits one party. Consequently, at least one party dislikes regulatory risk. Moreover, both political parties gain from eliminating regulatory risk when political divergence is small or the winning probability of the regulatory–risk–averse party is not too large. Because of a commitment problem, direct political bargaining is insufficient to eliminate regulatory risk. Politically independent regulatory agencies solve this commitment problem.regulation, regulatory risk, political economy, independent regulatory agency

PUBLIC FUNDING OF POLITICAL PARTIES

This paper concerns public funding of parties. Parties receive public funds depending on their vote share. Funds finance electoral campaigns. Two cases are investigated. In the first some voters are policy motivated and some are "impressionable" - their vote depends directly on campaign expenditures. In the second campaigning is informative and all voters are policy motivated. Public funds increase policy convergence in both cases. The effect is larger, the more funding depends on vote shares. When campaigns are informative, there may be multiple equilibria. Intuitively, a large party can stay large since it receives large funds.Public Funding, Political Competition, Information.

Businessman Candidates: Special-Interest Politics in Weakly Institutionalized Environments

We initiate examination of the political boundaries of the firm by exploring the phenomenon of “businessman candidates”: business owners and managers who bypass conventional means of political influence to run for public office themselves. We argue that in-house production of political influence will be more likely in institutional environments where candidates find it difficult to make binding campaign promises. When campaign promises are binding, then a businessman may always pay a professional politician to run on the platform that political competition would otherwise compel the businessman to adopt. In contrast, when commitment to a campaign platform is impossible, then candidate identity matters for the policies that will be adopted ex post, implying that a businessman may choose to run for office if the stakes are sufficiently large. We illustrate our arguments through discussion of gubernatorial elections in postcommunist Russia, where businessmen frequently run for public office, institutions to encourage elected officials to keep their campaign promises are weak, and competition for rents is intense.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40119/3/wp733.pd

The Economics of Election Campaign Spending Limits

Spending limits are an important rule in the electoral game. Critics of limits claim that incumbents write these rules to keep down promising challengers. Their arguments are seductive but do not stand on a firm empirical base. The data seem quite eager to support or reject the critics' view, given the proper massaging. This paper suggests that if incumbents profit from spending limits, they will take their profit in a way that leaves no trace in the data. Profit does not come in the form of higher votes for the incumbent, but as richer government spoils for their close supporters. This explanation goes against the traditional view of how limits help incumbents. The explanation also helps to explain why there may never be a winner in the empirical debate on whether incumbents or challengers profit from limits.Campaign spending spending limits, election finance regulation, economics of information