American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Signaling Character in Electoral Competition
American Economic Review
vol. 97,
no. 3, June 2007
(pp. 852–870)
Abstract
We study a one-dimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the following innovation: a fraction of candidates have "character" and are exogenously committed to a campaign platform; this is unobservable to voters. Character is desirable, and a voter's utility is a convex combination of standard policy preferences and her assessment of a candidate's character. This structure induces a signaling game between strategic candidates and voters, since a policy platform affects voters' utilities not only directly, but also indirectly through inferences about a candidate's character. The model generates a number of predictions, starting with a failure of the median voter theorem. (JEL D72, D82)Citation
Kartik, Navin, and R. Preston McAfee. 2007. "Signaling Character in Electoral Competition." American Economic Review, 97 (3): 852–870. DOI: 10.1257/aer.97.3.852Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design