IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/clt/sswopa/1258.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Political reputations and campaign promises

Author

Listed:
  • Aragones, Enriqueta
  • Palfrey, Thomas R.
  • Postlewaite, Andrew

Abstract

We analyze conditions under which candidates' reputations may affect voters' beliefs over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze an equilibrium in which voters' strategies involve a credible threat to punish candidates who renege on their campaign promises and in which all campaign promises are believed by voters and honored by candidates. We characterize the maximal credible campaign promises and find that the degree to which promises are credible in equilibrium is an increasing function of the value of a candidate's reputation. (JEL: D8) (c) 2007 by the European Economic Association.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Aragones, Enriqueta & Palfrey, Thomas R. & Postlewaite, Andrew, 2006. "Political reputations and campaign promises," Working Papers 1258, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:clt:sswopa:1258
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/SSPapers/sswp1258.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Castañeda Dower, Paul & Pfutze, Tobias, 2015. "Vote suppression and insecure property rights," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 1-19.
    2. Böhm, Tobias, 2008. "Essays on Incentives in Public and Private Institutions," Munich Dissertations in Economics 8506, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
    3. Javier Rivas, 2016. "Private agenda and re-election incentives," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 46(4), pages 899-915, April.
    4. repec:eee:jeborg:v:142:y:2017:i:c:p:348-367 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Etienne Farvaque & Gael Lagadec, 2009. "Electoral Control when Policies are for Sale," CESifo Working Paper Series 2522, CESifo Group Munich.
    6. Selim Jürgen Ergun, 2015. "Centrist’S Curse? An Electoral Competition Model With Credibility Constraints," The Singapore Economic Review (SER), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 60(05), pages 1-18, December.
    7. Carlos Seixas & António Brandão & Manuel Luís Costa, 2013. "Policy Choices by an Incumbent - A Case with Down-Up Problem, Bias Beliefs and Retrospective Voting," FEP Working Papers 485, Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto.
    8. Guido, Cataife, 2007. "The pronouncements of paranoid politicians," MPRA Paper 4473, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. César Martinelli & John Duggan, 2014. "The Political Economy of Dynamic Elections: A Survey and Some New Results," Working Papers 1403, Centro de Investigacion Economica, ITAM.
    10. Gari Walkowitz & Arne R. Weiss, 2014. ""Read my Lips!" Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Electoral Competition on Shirking and Trust," Cologne Graduate School Working Paper Series 05-07, Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences.
    11. Hans Gersbach & Oriol Tejada & Maik T. Schneider, 2014. "Coalition-Preclusion Contracts and Moderate Policies," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 14/195, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    12. repec:aea:aecrev:v:107:y:2017:i:7:p:1824-57 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Murtinu, Samuele & Piccirilli, Giulio & Sacchi, Agnese, 2016. "Fiscal Policy, Government Polarization, and the Economic Literacy of Voters," MPRA Paper 74864, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Gersbach Hans, 2012. "Contractual Democracy," Review of Law & Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 8(3), pages 823-851, December.
    15. Gersbach, Hans & Schneider, Maik T., 2012. "Tax contracts and elections," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(7), pages 1461-1479.
    16. Jean Guillaume Forand & John Duggan, 2013. "Markovian Elections," Working Papers 1305, University of Waterloo, Department of Economics, revised Oct 2013.
    17. Ivo Bischoff & Lars-H. Siemers, 2013. "Biased beliefs and retrospective voting: why democracies choose mediocre policies," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 156(1), pages 163-180, July.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:clt:sswopa:1258. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Victoria Mason). General contact details of provider: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/ss .

    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.

    We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.