Voting Under Salience Bias and Strategic Extremism

We present a model demonstrating politicians strategically adopt extreme positions even when the voters are homogeneous and moderate. We examine the behavior of voters and electoral candidates under the assumption that the salience of political issues affects voting decisions through voter preferences. Voters have limited attention, which is unintentionally captured by distinctive policies. We demonstrate that candidates who differ in their budget constraints and voters with such limited attention can account for extremist policies, even though voters are identical in their preferences. Subsequently, we examine the elections with decoy candidates unlikely to win. Even though these candidates do not attract the voters, they might still influence the election outcome by altering salience. Moreover, we provide experimental evidence that salience affects consumer preferences and election outcomes using a representative sample of Turkey's vote base.