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The Real Swing Voter's Curse

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James A. Robinson
Ragnar Torvik

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Abstract

A key idea in political economy is that policy is often tailored to voters who are not ideologically attached - swing voters. We show, however, that in political environments where political parties can use repression and violence to exclude voters from elections, they may optimally target the swing voters. This is because they anticipate that if they had to compete for the support of these voters, they would end up giving them a lot of policy favors. Hence in weakly institutionalized political environments swing voters are cursed rather than blessed. We illustrate the analysis with a discussion of recent political events in Zimbabwe.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14799.

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Date of creation: Mar 2009
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14799

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H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government

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  1. Feddersen, Timothy J & Pesendorfer, Wolfgang, 1996. "The Swing Voter's Curse," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(3), pages 408-24, June.
    Other versions:
    • Timothy J. Feddersen & Wolfgang Pesendorfer, 1995. "The Swing Voter's Curse," Discussion Papers 1064, Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science. [Downloadable!]
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This page was last updated on 2009-11-25.

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