IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v132y2007i1p231-246.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Candidate uncertainty, mental models, and complexity: Some experimental results

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Ensley
  • Scott Marchi
  • Michael Munger

Abstract

Since the work of Downs (1957), spatial models of elections have been a mainstay of research in political science and public choice. Despite the plethora of theoretical and empirical research involving spatial models, researchers have not considered in great detail the complexity of the decision task that a candidate confronts. Two facets of a candidate’s decision process are investigated here, using a set of laboratory experiments where subjects face a fixed incumbent in a two-dimensional policy space. First, we analyze the effect that the complexity of the electoral landscape has on the ability of the subject to defeat the incumbent. Second, we analyze the impact that a subject’s “mental model” (which we infer from a pre-experiment questionnaire) has on her performance. The experimental results suggest that the complexity of a candidate’s decision task and her perception of the task may be important factors in electoral competition. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Ensley & Scott Marchi & Michael Munger, 2007. "Candidate uncertainty, mental models, and complexity: Some experimental results," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 132(1), pages 231-246, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:132:y:2007:i:1:p:231-246
    DOI: 10.1007/s11127-007-9149-x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-007-9149-x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11127-007-9149-x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fiorina, Morris P., 1977. "The Case of the Vanishing Marginals: The Bureaucracy Did It," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 71(1), pages 177-181, March.
    2. Cover, Albert D. & Brumberg, Bruce S., 1982. "Baby Books and Ballots: The Impact of Congressional Mail on Constituent Opinion," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 76(2), pages 347-359, June.
    3. Rick K. Wilson, 2005. "Classroom Games: Candidate Convergence," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 71(4), pages 913-922, April.
    4. Arthur T. Denzau & Douglass C. North, 1994. "Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions," Kyklos, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(1), pages 3-31, February.
    5. Anthony Downs, 1957. "An Economic Theory of Political Action in a Democracy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 65(2), pages 135-135.
    6. Coates, Dennis, 1995. "Measuring the "Personal Vote" of Members of Congress," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 85(3-4), pages 227-248, December.
    7. Kollman, Ken & Miller, John H. & Page, Scott E., 1998. "Political Parties and Electoral Landscapes," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 28(1), pages 139-158, January.
    8. Mann, Thomas E. & Wolfinger, Raymond E., 1980. "Candidates and Parties in Congressional Elections," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 74(3), pages 617-632, September.
    9. Kollman, Ken & Miller, John H. & Page, Scott E., 1992. "Adaptive Parties in Spatial Elections," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 86(4), pages 929-937, December.
    10. Axelrod, Robert, 1973. "Schema Theory: An Information Processing Model of Perception and Cognition," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 67(4), pages 1248-1266, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Darren Grant & Michael Toma, 2008. "Elemental tests of the traditional rational voting model," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 137(1), pages 173-195, October.
    2. Michael J. Ensley & Michael W. Tofias & Scott De Marchi, 2009. "District Complexity as an Advantage in Congressional Elections," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 53(4), pages 990-1005, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bendor, Jonathan & Diermeier, Daniel & Ting, Michael M., 2000. "A Behavioral Model of Turnout," Research Papers 1627, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    2. Bärbel M. R. Stadler, 1998. "Abstention Causes Bifurcations in Two-Party Voting Dynamics," Working Papers 98-08-072, Santa Fe Institute.
    3. Michael J. Ensley & Michael W. Tofias & Scott De Marchi, 2009. "District Complexity as an Advantage in Congressional Elections," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 53(4), pages 990-1005, October.
    4. Forand, Jean Guillaume, 2014. "Two-party competition with persistent policies," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 64-91.
    5. Scott de Marchi, 1999. "Adaptive Models and Electoral Instability," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 11(3), pages 393-419, July.
    6. Carrie Eaves, 2018. "Running in Someone Else’s Shoes: The Electoral Consequences of Running as an Appointed Senator," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 7(5), pages 1-12, May.
    7. Bilge Öztürk Göktuna, 2019. "A dynamic model of party membership and ideologies," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 31(2), pages 209-243, April.
    8. Paul V. Warwick, 2004. "Proximity, Directionality, and the Riddle of Relative Party Extremeness," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 16(3), pages 263-287, July.
    9. Schnellenbach, Jan & Schubert, Christian, 2015. "Behavioral political economy: A survey," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 40(PB), pages 395-417.
    10. Kollman, Ken & Miller, John H. & Page, Scott E., 1997. "Landscape formation in a spatial voting model," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 55(1), pages 121-130, August.
    11. John Jackson, 2014. "Location, location, location: the Davis-Hinich model of electoral competition," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 159(1), pages 197-218, April.
    12. Larry Samuelson, 1984. "Electoral equilibria with restricted strategies," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 43(3), pages 307-327, January.
    13. Michel Schilperoord & Jan Rotmans & Noam Bergman, 2008. "Modelling societal transitions with agent transformation," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 14(4), pages 283-301, December.
    14. Vlad Tarko & Kyle O’Donnell, 2019. "Escape from Europe: a calculus of consent model of the origins of liberal institutions in the North American colonies," Constitutional Political Economy, Springer, vol. 30(1), pages 70-95, March.
    15. Munger, Michael C, 2000. "Five Questions: An Integrated Research Agenda for Public Choice," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 103(1-2), pages 1-12, April.
    16. Emily Clough, 2008. "Still Converging? a Downsian Party System Without Polls," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 20(4), pages 461-476, October.
    17. Douglas Hart & Michael Munger, 1989. "Declining electoral competitiveness in the House of Representatives: The differential impact of improved transportation technology," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 61(3), pages 217-228, June.
    18. Katsuya Kobayashi & Hideo Konishi, 2016. "Endogenous party structure," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 17(4), pages 317-351, November.
    19. Jie-Shin Lin, 2005. "An Analysis on Simulation Models of Competing Parties," Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 284, Society for Computational Economics.
    20. Vjollca Sadiraj & Jan Tuinstra & Frans Winden, 2006. "A computational electoral competition model with social clustering and endogenous interest groups as information brokers," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 129(1), pages 169-187, October.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:132:y:2007:i:1:p:231-246. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.