Campaigns, Political Mobility, and Communication

Abstract

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