The Real Swing Voter's Curse

Abstract

A central idea in political economy is that vot ers who are not ideologically attached to a politi cal party, so-called “swing voters,” attract policy favors and redistribution because they become the focus of electoral competition. In many parts of the world, however, politicians do not just use carrots to win elections, they also use sticks— coercion and violence. In this paper, we show that expanding the “policy space” to incorporate this can completely overturn the predictions of the standard model. The reason for this is simple. With all groups of voters at play, political competition does indeed lead to a chase for the sup