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"It's the Challenger, Stupid!": Elections and the Theory of Rank-Order Tournaments

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Author Info
Michael Funk
Reiner Eichenberger

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Abstract

Democratic elections look very much like a contest where voters have to compare the candidates according to an ordinal ranking. Nevertheless, the theory of tournaments has not yet been applied to Political Economics. Therefore, we deploy tournament models to analyse elections. The main difference between tournaments in a firm and election tournaments is a systematic asymmetry between the contestants: whereas the voters have plenty of information about the incumbent, they hardly know anything about the challenger. Unlike most models of political accountability that model the challenger as a standard, we focus on the specific role of the challenger and model him as a random draw with a given expected ability. Consequently the ordinal ranking of the candidates contains plenty of noise, which weakens the incumbent's incentives to exert e¤ort. After the presentation of the basic model, several extensions of the tournament theme in politics are explored. The model gives a fresh insight into very important aspects of politics, such as sabotage and selection, and it identifies exective policy reforms, e.g. the deregulation of politics.

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Paper provided by Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) in its series CREMA Working Paper Series with number 2007-20.

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Date of creation: Oct 2007
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Handle: RePEc:cra:wpaper:2007-20

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Related research
Keywords: Tournament; Political Agency; Elections;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty
D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
H11 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - Structure and Scope of Government

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