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American Economic Review Vol. 97 No. 3 2007

Signaling Character in Electoral Competition

Navin Kartik1; R. Preston McAfee2

1 Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0508. · 2 Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125.

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.

DOI
10.1257/aer.97.3.852
Volume
97
Issue
3
Pages
852-870
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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