Competing for Recognition through Public Good Provision

Consider a setting in which several groups of individuals with common interests (“clubs”) compete with each other for recognition by other individuals. Depending on the context, recognition may be expressed by these other individuals joining a club, or choosing one club to admire. Clubs compete by providing a public good. Some examples for applications of this model include: (i) Churches missionarizing to attract new members; (ii) Open-source software projects and Wikipedia; (iii) professors of an economics department competing to attract graduate students to their respective fields; (iv) artists and researchers aiming for recognition of their work by their peers and the public. Competition between clubs increases the public good provision level, and a sufficiently strong competition effect may even lead to overprovision.public goods, private provision, clubs, competition

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

Elites or Masses? A Structural Model of Policy Divergence, Voter Sorting and Apparent Polarization in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1972-2008

One of the most widely discussed phenomena in American politics today is the perceived increasing partisan divide that splits the U.S. electorate. A central contested question is whether this diagnosis is actually true, and if so, what is the underlying cause. We develop a model that relates the parties’ positions on economic and “cultural” issues, the voters’ ideal positions and the electorate’s voting behavior, and apply the model to U.S. presidential elections between 1972 and 2008. The model allows us to recover candidates’ positions from voter behavior; to decompose changes in the overall political polarization of the electorate into changes in the distribution of voter ideal positions and consequences of elite polarization; and to determine the characteristics of voters who changed their party allegiance.polarization, differentiated candidates, policy divergence, ideology, voter migration

Majority-efficiency and Competition-efficiency in a Binary Policy Model

We introduce a general framework in which politicians choose a (possibly infinite) sequence of binary policies. The two competing candidates are exogenously committed to particular actions on a subset of these issues, while they can choose any policy for the remaining issues to maximize their winning probability. Citizens have general preferences over policies, and the distribution of preferences may be uncertain. We show that a special case of the model, the weighted-issue model, provides a tractable multidimensional model of candidate competition that can generate (i) policy divergence in pure and mixed strategies, (ii) adoption of minority positions, and (iii) inefficient outcomes.multidimensional policy, voting, citizen-candidate, normative analysis of political competition

Social Ideology and Taxes in a Differentiated Candidates Framework

How does ideological polarization on non-economic matters influence the size of government? We analyze this question using a differentiated candidates framework: Two office-motivated candidates differ in their (fixed) ideological position and their production function for public goods, and choose which tax rate to propose. We provide conditions under which a unique equilibrium exists. In equilibrium, candidates propose different tax rates, and the extent of economic differentiation is influenced by the distribution and intensity of non-economic preferences in the electorate. In turn, the extent of economic differentiation influences whether parties divide the electorate primarily along economic or social lines.differentiated candidates, policy divergence, ideology

Political Polarization and the Electoral Effects of Media Bias

Many political commentators diagnose an increasing polarization of the U.S. electorate into two opposing camps. However, in standard spatial voting models, changes in the political preference distribution are irrelevant as long as the position of the median voter does not change. We show that media bias provides a mechanism through which political polarization can affect electoral outcomes.In our model, media firms’ profits depend on their audience rating. Maximizing profits may involve catering to a partisan audience by slanting the news. While voters are rational, understand the nature of the news suppression bias and update appropriately, important information is lost through bias, potentially resulting in inefficient electoral outcomes. We show that polarization increases the profitability of slanting news, thereby raising the likelihood of electoral mistakes. We also show that, if media are biased, then there are some news realizations such that the electorate appears more polarized to an outside observer, even if citizens’ policy preferences do not change.media bias, polarization, information aggregation, democracy

National polarization means that it no longer pays for local candidates to appeal to all voters

In theory, political candidates who have the widest appeal are the most likely to win elections. But recent decades have shown us that this is decidedly not the case: polarization now means that quite extreme candidates win elections in many districts. Mattias Polborn uses a new model of legislative elections and finds that extreme candidates are likely to prevail if the positions of national politicians and parties are important factors for voters

Why a move to a simultaneous Presidential Primary system might be counter-productive

Despite the current wall-to-wall coverage of the 2016 primary race, the primary elections themselves are not scheduled to begin until February 2016, and will last until June. This drawn-out primary cycle gives a great deal of influence to a small number of voters in early primary states, such as Iowa and New Hampshire. George Deltas, Helios Herrera and Mattias Polborn look at proposed alternatives to this system, in the form of a one-day national primary system or one where all states in the Northeast, Midwest, West and South would vote simultaneously. Using models of voter information, they argue that a sequential voting system performs much better than a one-day national primary, but that the parties could improve the system even further by encouraging lagging candidates to drop out more quickly