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

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

A Vindication of Responsible Parties

Electoral platform convergence is perceived unfavorably by both the popular press and many academic scholars. This paper provides a formal account of these perceived negative effects. We show that when parties do not know voters’ preferences perfectly, voters prefer some platform divergence to the convergent policy outcome of competition between opportunistic, office-motivated, parties. We characterize when voters prefer responsible parties (which weight policy positively in their utility function) to oppor- tunistic ones. Voters prefer responsible parties when office benefits and concentration of moderate voters are high enough relative to the ideological polarization between parties. In particular, with optimally-chosen office benefits, responsible parties improve welfare.

Ideology and existence of 50%-majority equilibria in multidimensional spatial voting models

When aggregating individual preferences through the majority rule in an n-dimensional spatial voting model, the `worst-case' scenario is a social choice configuration where no political equilibrium exists unless a super majority rate as high as 1-1/n is adopted. In this paper we assume that a lower d-dimensional (d smaller than n) linear map spans the possible candidates' platforms. These d `ideological' dimensions imply some linkages between the n political issues. We randomize over these linkages and show that there almost surely exists a 50%-majority equilibria in the above worst-case scenario, when n grows to infinity. Moreover the equilibrium is the mean voter. The speed of convergence (toward 50%) of the super majority rate guaranteeing existence of equilibrium is computed for d=1 and 2.

Politics, Information and the Urban Bias

Governments in many developing countries skew public resources towards urban sectors, despite a majority of citizens residing in rural areas. This paper develops a novel political argument for this urban bias phenomenon in a framework where all voters, rural and urban, have equal voice, but di?er in their access to information. We argue that this di?erence is su?cient to give governments an incentive to ine?ciently overallocate resources towards urban areas. The bias is shown to worsen during adverse economic times, leading to increased migration. We also examine how voter informativeness a?ects e?ciency of the electoral process in weeding out incompetent governments.Urban Bias, Information, Heterogeneous Electorate, Migration.

Public Information and Electoral Bias

We present a theory of strategic voting that predicts elections are more likely to be close and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate. These findings are disturbing because they suggest that providing more information to potential voters about aggregate political preferences (e.g., through polls, political stock markets, or expert forecasts) may actually undermine the democratic process. We show that if the distribution of preferences is common knowledge, then strategic voting leads to a stark neutrality result in which the probability that either alternative wins the election is 12. This occurs because membersof the minority compensate exactly for their smaller group size by voting with higher frequency. By contrast, when citizens are symmetrically ignorant about the distribution of types, the majority is more likely to win the election and expected voter turnout is lower. Indeed, when the population is large and voting costs are small, the majority wins with probability arbitrarily close to one in equilibrium. Welfare is, therefore, unambiguously higher when citizens possess less information about the distribution of political preferences.

Portfolio diversification and internalization of production externalities through majority voting

In absence of markets for externalities, the authors look for governances and conditions under which majority voting among shareholders is likely to give rise to efficient internalization. The central and natural role played by a governance of stakeholders is underlined and benchmarked.Production externalities; majority voting; portfolio diversification; general equilibrium; stakeholder governance; mean voter

Moderation in Proportional Systems: Coalitions Matter

This paper examines the role of the coalition formation process in a proportional system. It models its impact on the voters (who maximize their expected utilities) and the parties (who choose their platforms in a Nash game). In contrast with the intuitive idea that proportional systems represent “proportionally”, I show that a proportional system with minimal range coalitions leads to party convergence towards the median of the political spectrum. Indeed, a political party’s prospects of power are better when it is more likely to find ideological partners, i.e. when it is not ideologically isolated. In contrast, if coalitions are formed according to a minimum winning coalition rule a la Riker, any policy can be implemented in equilibrium

Competition between Specialized Candidates

We develop a formal model in which the government provides public goods in different policy fields for its citizens. We start from the basic premise that two office-motivated candidates have differential capabilities in different policy fields, and compete by proposing how to allocate government resources to those fields.The model has a unique equilibrium that differs substantially from the standard median-voter model. While candidates compete for the support of a moderate voter type, this cutoff voter differs from the expected median voter. Moreover, no voter type except the cutoff voter is indifferent between the candidates in equilibrium. The model also predicts that candidates respond to changes in the preferences of voters in a very rigid way. We also analyze under which conditions candidates choose to strengthen the issue in which they have a competence advantage, and when they rather compensate for their weakness.issue ownership, differentiated candidates, policy divergence