Buying Informed Voters: New Effects of Information on Voters and Candidates*

Despite the prominence of information in theories of electoral accountability, providing voters with information often fails to improve politician performance. Using two experiments in the Philippines, we show that when voters are unfamiliar with basic government capabilities, merely informing them of what politicians could do is sufficient to decrease support for incumbents. However, politicians can counteract this decrease in support by increasing clientelistic practices such as vote buying. Our work shows how even neutral information campaigns can improve the leverage of voters vis-a-vis their politicians, offering guidance for the design of interventions to change the electoral equilibrium in clientelistic countries.

The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: Accountability, Commitment, and Responsiveness

We survey the literature on dynamic elections in the traditional settings of spatial preferences and rent seeking under perfect and imperfect monitoring of politicians. We define stationary electoral equilibrium, which encompasses notions used by Barro (1973), Ferejohn (1986), Banks and Sundaram (1998), and others. We show that repeated elections mitigate the commitment problems of politicians and voters, and that a responsive democracy result holds under general conditions. Term limits, however, attenuate the responsiveness finding. We also touch on related applied work, and we point to areas for fruitful future research, including the connection between dynamic models of politics and economics. ( JEL D72, D82, D83)

The Logic of Party Coalitions with Political Activism

This paper considers an electoral equilibrium between two party coalitions. Each coalition is composed of two factions called activists and opportunists. Activists are interested in announcing a policy as close as possible to their ideal policy and are ready to contribute with vital electoral resources to die one’s own party coalition. Opportunists are interested only in winning elections and need the activists’ contributions to enhance their party valence. Thus, the two factions of each coalition negotiate on both policy platform and activists' contributions. Results show that, in equilibrium, the marginal rates of substitution between policy position and activists’ contributions must be the same for the two negotiating factions inside party coalitions. Furthermore, greater activism inside parties leads to policy divergence.

Candidate Objectives and Electoral Equilibrium

This article looks at the known foundational results on spatial models of elections. The issues of equilibrium existence, the characterization of equilibria (in terms of their social welfare properties), and the distance between equilibrium policy and positions of the candidates are examined. It then discusses the results of the case where candidates are able to give precise predictions of voters' behaviour precisely; the article also introduces the ‘Downsian model’. The article looks at two models of probabilistic voting, before finally moving on to consider the most common objective functions that are used to model the electoral incentives of different types of candidates.

The Effect of Candidate Quality on Electoral Equilibrium: An Experimental Study

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one-dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium varies systematically with the level of uncertainty about the location of the median voter. We test these three predictions using laboratory experiments and find strong support for all three. We also observe some biases and show that they can be explained by quantal response equilibrium.

Realignment and Macropartisanship

Aggregate party identification (macropartisanship) has exhibited substantial movement in the U.S. electorate over the last half century. We contend that a major key to that movement is a rare, massive, and enduring shift of the electoral equilibrium commonly known as a partisan realignment. The research, which is based on time-series data that employ the classic measurement of party identification, shows that the 1980 election triggered a systematic growth of Republican identification that cut deeply into the overwhelming Democratic lead dating back to the New Deal realignment. Although short-term fluctuations in macropartisanship are responsive to the elements of everyday politics, neither presidential approval nor consumer sentiment is found responsible for the 1980 shift.