IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iuk/wpaper/2010-07.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Conflict Theory of Voting

Author

Listed:
  • Jeremy Petranka

    (Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, Indiana University Kelley School of Business)

Abstract

Research in the behavioral psychology of voting has found that voters tend to be poorly informed, highly responsive to candidate personality, and follow a "fast and frugal" heuristic. This paper analyzes optimal candidate strategies in a two-party election in which voters are assumed to behave according to these traits. Under this assumption, candidates face a trade-off between appealing to a broader base and being overly ambiguous in their policy stances. A decrease in the cost of ambiguity within this model offers a parsimonious justification for the increase in voter independence, candidate ambiguity, and party politics that empirical studies have revealed over the last five decades. I additionally argue a decrease in the cost of ambiguity is a natural result of the primary system, campaign finance reform, and changing media environment.

Suggested Citation

  • Jeremy Petranka, 2008. "A Conflict Theory of Voting," Working Papers 2010-07, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, revised Mar 2010.
    • Handle: RePEc:iuk:wpaper:2010-07
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://kelley.iu.edu/riharbau/RePEc/iuk/wpaper/bepp2010-07-petranka.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jeremy Petranka, 2009. "A Threshold Interpretation of the Ratio-Form Contest Success Function," Working Papers 2010-06, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, revised Mar 2010.
    2. Gigerenzer, Gerd & Todd, Peter M. & ABC Research Group,, 2000. "Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780195143812.
    3. Weber,Elke U. & Baron,Jonathan & Loomes,Graham (ed.), 2001. "Conflict and Tradeoffs in Decision Making," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521772389.
    4. John Ledyard, 1984. "The pure theory of large two-candidate elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 44(1), pages 7-41, January.
    5. Tim Groseclose & Jeffrey Milyo, 2005. "A Measure of Media Bias," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(4), pages 1191-1237.
    6. Groseclose, Tim & Levitt, Steven D. & Snyder, James M., 1999. "Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 93(1), pages 33-50, March.
    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. Jeremy Petranka, 2009. "A Threshold Interpretation of the Ratio-Form Contest Success Function," Working Papers 2010-06, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy, revised Mar 2010.

    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. John Gasper, 2009. "Reporting for sale: the market for news coverage," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 141(3), pages 493-508, December.
    2. Junze Sun & Arthur Schram & Randolph Sloof, 2019. "A Theory on Media Bias and Elections," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 19-048/I, Tinbergen Institute.
    3. Michael P. Cameron, 2021. "Two models for illustrating the economics of media bias in introductory economics," Working Papers in Economics 21/08, University of Waikato.
    4. Julian Freitag & Anna Kerkhof & Johannes Münster, 2021. "Selective Sharing of News Items and the Political Position of News Outlets," CESifo Working Paper Series 8943, CESifo.
    5. Freitag, Julian & Kerkhof, Anna & Münster, Johannes, 2021. "Selective sharing of news items and the political position of news outlets," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 56(C).
    6. Stefano DellaVigna & Ruben Durante & Brian Knight & Eliana La Ferrara, 2016. "Market-Based Lobbying: Evidence from Advertising Spending in Italy," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 8(1), pages 224-256, January.
    7. Stephen A. Hillegeist & James P. Kavourakis & Matthew Pinnuck, 2023. "The association between quarter length, forecast errors, and firms’ voluntary disclosures," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 63(2), pages 1885-1918, June.
    8. Bernhardt, Lea & Dewenter, Ralf & Thomas, Tobias, 2020. "Measuring partisan media bias in US Newscasts from 2001-2012," Working Paper 183/2020, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, revised 15 Nov 2022.
    9. Simon P. Anderson & John McLaren, 2012. "Media Mergers And Media Bias With Rational Consumers," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 10(4), pages 831-859, August.
    10. Luis R. Martinez & Jonas Jessen & Guo Xu, 2023. "A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 15(1), pages 68-106, January.
    11. , & ,, 2006. "Group formation and voter participation," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 1(4), pages 461-487, December.
    12. Bennani, Hamza, 2018. "Media coverage and ECB policy-making: Evidence from an augmented Taylor rule," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 26-38.
    13. León, Gianmarco, 2017. "Turnout, political preferences and information: Experimental evidence from Peru," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C), pages 56-71.
    14. John W. Patty, 2005. "Generic Difference of Expected Vote Share and Probability of Victory Maximization in Simple Plurality Elections with Probabilistic Voters," Public Economics 0502006, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Dewenter, Ralf & Dulleck, Uwe & Thomas, Tobias, 2016. "Does the 4th estate deliver? Towards more direct measure of political media bias," Working Paper 175/2016, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg.
    16. Francetich, Alejandro & Kreps, David, 2020. "Choosing a good toolkit, II: Bayes-rule based heuristics," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    17. Redlicki, B., 2017. "Spreading Lies," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1747, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    18. William H. Greene & Mark N. Harris & Rachel J. Knott & Nigel Rice, 2021. "Specification and testing of hierarchical ordered response models with anchoring vignettes," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 184(1), pages 31-64, January.
    19. Jason Matthew DeBacker, 2015. "Flip‐Flopping: Ideological Adjustment Costs In The United States Senate," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 53(1), pages 108-128, January.
    20. Alastair Smith & Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Tom LaGatta, 2017. "Group incentives and rational voting1," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 29(2), pages 299-326, April.

    More about this item

    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:iuk:wpaper:2010-07. 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: Rick Harbaugh (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dpiubus.html .

    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.