American Political Science Review · 1994 · 655 citations · 24 references
Social SciencesPolitical SciencePublic FinanceElectoral PoliticsMicroeconomicsPublic EconomicsElectionsElectoral BehaviorElectoral CompetitionPolitical CompetitionPublic ChoiceVoting BehaviorCompetitive ElectionsElection Campaign EffectsElectoral Campaign EffectsEquilibriumIdeal PointsPolitical Competition ModelsPublic Campaign FinancingPublic Financing Mechanisms
Candidates must balance policy choices that raise campaign funds to sway uninformed voters against those that appeal to informed voters. The paper develops a model of electoral competition where candidates use policy choices to raise contributions and then spend them to influence uninformed voters, extending the framework to public financing and incumbency. The model assumes candidates select policies that benefit interest groups to raise contributions, then expend those contributions to influence uninformed voters, with additional provisions for public financing and incumbency advantages. Equilibria differ by policy type: with particularistic policies, candidates’ policies separate when uninformed voters are numerous, with separation increasing with their share; with collective policies, candidates converge to the informed voters’ median and contributions vanish.
I present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies. Informed voters, however, vote based on those policies, so candidates face a trade-off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote. Electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies: particularistic and collective. In the case of particularistic policies, the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high, and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion. The model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages. For the case of collective policies, the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters, and contributions are zero.
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The Theory of Committees and Elections.
Stuart Alan, Duncan Black · Economica · 1959 · 2.9K citations
J. Pfanzagl, R. Duncan Luce · Econometrica · 1962 · 2.5K citations