Electoral competition and politician turnover

2006

Analyses of political competition typically focus on interparty competition. We introduce intraparty politics into the analysis. We show how the characteristics of the election affect both intra-and interparty competition. When interparty competition stiffens (either because the electorate is better informed or because politicians expect higher perks from office), parties tend to rely on non-competitive selection procedures. For this reason, intensifying interparty competition need not increase voters' welfare. Ideological motivation also induces the parties to rely on an unchallenged leader, which has the same effect on welfare. In contrast, parties promote competitive selection procedures when voters are ill informed about the candidates' performance, when politicians are opportunistic, and when the rents from office are low. These results also shed new light on the introduction of Direct Primary elections in the U.S. JEL Classification: D23, D72, D81.

When can a party insider, such as an incumbent, feel safe from an outside challenge for a future nomination? In most countries, parties can choose whether to hold a primary election where the rank-and-file members take a vote, or instead allowing party leaders to directly appoint an insider candidate of their liking. The cost of primaries is forcing candidates to drift away from the party leader's policy preferences in order to cater to primary voters. But this paper postulates a benefit: primary elections can reveal information about the electability of potential candidates. I depart from the existing literature by making the realistic assumption that such information is revealed partially rather than fully. A signaling mechanism is introduced whereby pre-candidates send noisy information that is used by primary voters to update their beliefs. In this sense, the paper falls in the tradition initiated by Condorcet(1785), Austen-Smith and Banks (1996), and Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1998) of aggregating information through voting. This leads to surprising insights about the behavior of primary voters: under some circumstances they will use the information provided by primary campaigns, but under other circumstances, they will choose to completely ignore such information. In addition, the results predict that popular incumbents will not be challenged in a primary election, which is consistent with empirical observation. Finally, a prescription for parties is to allow their primaries to be tough given that stiff competition will improve the expected ability of the nominee.

Games and Economic Behavior, 2009

We study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model where voters have incomplete information. We identify a novel "party competition e¤ect."Compared with "at large" selection of candidates, party selection makes o¢ ce-holders more willing to avoid extreme ideological stands. Politicians follow party discipline, even in absence of a party-controlled reward mechanism. Voters of all ideologies bene…t from the party-competition e¤ect, which thus provides a novel rationale for political parties. When politicians have an (imperfect) informational advantage over voters, we additionally …nd a "party screening e¤ect." Parties select moderate candidates, because they anticipate that their candidate's ideological record can be veri…ably disclosed through campaigning. Under reasonable functional assumptions, all voters bene…t from party screening.

2006

We study a unidimensional model of spatial competition between two parties with two types of politicians. The office oriented politicians, referred to as “opportunist” politicians, care only about the spoils of the office. The policy oriented politicians, referred to as “militant” politicians have ideological preferences on the policy space. In this framework, we compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils of office are split among the two parties proportionally to their share of the vote.We study the existence of short term political equilibria and then, within an evolutionary setup, the dynamics and stability of policies and of party membership decisions

Quarterly Journal of Political …, 2006

We model political parties as adaptive decision-makers who compete in a sequence of elections. The key assumptions are that winners satisfice (the winning party in period t keeps its platform in t + 1) while losers search. Under fairly mild assumptions about losers' search rules, we show that the sequence of winning platforms is absorbed into the top cycle of the (finite) set of feasible platforms with probability one. This implies that if there is a majority rule winner then ultimately the incumbent party will espouse it. However, our model, unlike Downs-Hotelling or Kollman-Miller-Page, does not predict full convergence: we show, under weak assumptions about the out-party's search, that losing parties do not stabilize at the majority rule winner (should it exist). We also establish, both analytically and computationally, that the adaptive process is robust: if a majority rule winner "nearly" exists then the trajectory of winning platforms tends to be "close" to the trajectory of a process which actually has such a winner. -for their work on the computational model.

2003

This paper examines competition in a spatial model of two-candidate elections, where one candidate enjoys a quality advantage over the other candidate. The candidates care about winning and also have policy preferences. There is two-dimensional private information. Candidate ideal points as well as their tradeoffs between policy preferences and winning are private information. The distribution of this two-dimensional type is common knowledge. The location of the median voter’s ideal point is uncertain, with a distribution that is commonly known by both candidates. Pure strategy equilibria always exist in this model. We characterize the effects of increased uncertainty about the median voter, the effect of candidate policy preferences, and the effects of changes in the distribution of private information. We prove that the distribution of candidate policies approaches the mixed equilibrium of Aragones and Palfrey [2], when both candidates’ weights on policy preferences go to zero.

European Journal of Political Economy, 1991

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2005

In most major democracies there are very few parties compared to the number of possible policy positions held by voters. We provide an e¢ ciency rationale for why it might be appropriate to limit the proliferation of parties.

2009

Does electoral competition lead to a better selection of politicians while providing also stronger reelection incentives to incumbents? To address the existence of this double dividend of political competition, we introduce a theoretical model in which ideological parties have to select political candidates between party loyals and experts, and have to allocate them into the electoral districts. Non-ideological voters care about national and local policies and strongly prefer experts, who are better able to respond to the shocks to the economy. Parties hence face a trade-off between more party loyalty and more expertise and hence a higher probability of winning the election. We show that competition disciplines political parties to select more experts and to allocate them in more contestable districts. Expert candidates serve also as a commitment device of the future policies. The theoretical model also suggests that re-election incentives induce the incumbents in contestable districts to acquire costly information about the economic shock and to exert more effort. This effect is particularly strong for the low-quality incumbents. The empirical evidence on Italian political elections confirms the main predictions of the model. According to different indicators of contestability of the districts, we find that measures of ex-ante quality--such as years of schooling, previous market income, and local government experience--decrease the probability of running in a safe district. Furthermore, politicians elected in safe districts carry out fewer bills for their constituency and make more absences in parliament. To disentangle incentives from selection, we exploit exogenous variations in national alliances, which altered the degree of contestability of some districts. We find that incentives matter only for low-quality candidates: if a safe district turns contestable, politicians tend to exert more effort. But the opposite does not hold: politicians elected in contestable districts display high productivity even if their district turns safe.

We investigate the relationship between quality of politicians and reward from public office in a game between parties and citizens, in which parties play a crucial role in the selection of candidates. Citizens who wish to become politicians have to become party activists first. Parties produce information about the quality of potential candidates. An increase in the reward from public offices leads to two opposing effects on the average quality of politicians: 1) A selection effect, whereby more skilled citizens enter politics, leading to an increase in average quality; 2) An information manipulation effect such that unskilled activists will have a higher probability to be elected since parties find convenient to increase the degree of costly information manipulation leading to a decrease in average quality. We find that, for a plausible range of parameters values, the information manipulation effect dominates the selection effect when: 1) The cost of manipulating information is low enough; 2) The amount of information that parties can provide at no cost is low enough; 3) The net gains from becoming a politicians for unskilled citizens is sufficiently larger than that for skilled citizens. These findings provide a rational for the ambiguous sign of the empirical correlation (relationship) between quality and pay of politicians.