IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tin/wpaper/20010063.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Optimal Degree of Polarization

Author

Listed:
  • Ioulia V. Ossokina

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

  • Otto Swank

    (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Abstract

This discussion paper led to a publication in the 'European Journal of Political Economics', 2004, 20, 255-262. In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. Thereason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the sameexpectation. In this paper we study the normative implications of convergence in a simple model of electoralcompetition, in which parties are uncertain about voters' preferences. We show that if political parties haveincomplete information about voters' preferences, the voters may prefer some degree of policy divergence. Theintuition is that policy divergence enables voters to correct policies that are based on a wrong perception of theirdesires.

Suggested Citation

  • Ioulia V. Ossokina & Otto Swank, 2001. "The Optimal Degree of Polarization," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 01-063/1, Tinbergen Institute.
    • Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20010063
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.tinbergen.nl/01063.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Wittman, Donald, 1983. "Candidate Motivation: A Synthesis of Alternative Theories," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 77(1), pages 142-157, March.
    2. Hibbs, Douglas A., 1977. "Political Parties and Macroeconomic Policy," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 71(4), pages 1467-1487, December.
    3. Roger B. Myerson, 1995. "Analysis of Democratic Institutions: Structure, Conduct and Performance," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(1), pages 77-89, Winter.
    4. Ignacio Ortuno‐Ortín & Christian Schultz, 2005. "Public Funding of Political Parties," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 7(5), pages 781-791, December.
    5. John Ledyard, 1984. "The pure theory of large two-candidate elections," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 44(1), pages 7-41, January.
    6. Narwa, Daniel, 2001. "How general should the proximity model be?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 53-74, March.
    7. Wittman, Donald, 1977. "Candidates with policy preferences: A dynamic model," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 14(1), pages 180-189, February.
    8. Harrington, Joseph E, Jr, 1993. "Economic Policy, Economic Performance, and Elections," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(1), pages 27-42, March.
    9. Alesina, Alberto, 1988. "Credibility and Policy Convergence in a Two-Party System with Rational Voters," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(4), pages 796-805, September.
    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. Silvia Dominguez-Martinez & Otto Swank, 2006. "Polarization, Information Collection and Electoral Control," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 26(3), pages 527-545, June.
    2. Hortala-Vallve, Rafael & Esteve-Volart, Berta, 2011. "Voter turnout and electoral competition in a multidimensional policy space," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 376-384, June.
    3. Matsushima, Noriaki, 2007. "Uncertainty of voters' preferences and differentiation in a runoff system," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 23(4), pages 1185-1189, December.

    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. Persson, Torsten & Tabellini, Guido, 2002. "Political economics and public finance," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 24, pages 1549-1659, Elsevier.
    2. Antonio Merlo, 2005. "Whither Political Economy? Theories, Facts and Issues," PIER Working Paper Archive 05-033, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 01 Dec 2005.
    3. Silvia Dominguez-Martinez & Otto Swank, 2006. "Polarization, Information Collection and Electoral Control," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 26(3), pages 527-545, June.
    4. Juan Carlos Berganza, 1998. "Relationships Between Politicians and Voters Through Elections: A Review Essay," Working Papers wp1998_9809, CEMFI.
    5. Stahl, Dale O. & Turunen-Red, Arja H., 1995. "Tariff games: Cooperation with random variation in political regimes," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 215-238, June.
    6. Leonardo Felli & Antonio Merlo, 2006. "Endogenous Lobbying," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 4(1), pages 180-215, March.
    7. William D. Nordhaus, 1989. "Alternative Approaches to the Political Business Cycle," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 20(2), pages 1-68.
    8. Lodewijk Smets & Stephen Knack & Nadia Molenaers, 2013. "Political ideology, quality at entry and the success of economic reform programs," The Review of International Organizations, Springer, vol. 8(4), pages 447-476, December.
    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. Hortala-Vallve, Rafael & Esteve-Volart, Berta, 2011. "Voter turnout and electoral competition in a multidimensional policy space," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 376-384, June.
    11. Eric Dubois, 2016. "Political Business Cycles 40 Years after Nordhaus," Université Paris1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Post-Print and Working Papers) hal-01291401, HAL.
    12. Braendle, Thomas, 2013. "Do Institutions Affect Citizens' Selection into Politics?," Working papers 2013/04, Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Basel.
    13. Alex Cukierman & Yossi Spiegel, 2003. "When is the median voter paradigm a reasonable guide for policy choices in a representative democracy?," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(3), pages 247-284, November.
    14. Serena Marianna Drufuca, 2014. "Information, Media and Elections: Incentives for Media Capture," Working Papers (2013-) 1402, University of Bergamo, Department of Management, Economics and Quantitative Methods.
    15. Kristin Kanthak, 2002. "Top-Down Divergence," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 14(3), pages 301-323, July.
    16. Fernando Ferreira & Joseph Gyourko, 2009. "Do Political Parties Matter? Evidence from U.S. Cities," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 124(1), pages 399-422.
    17. Zakharov Alexei, 2005. "Candidate location and endogenous valence," EERC Working Paper Series 05-17e, EERC Research Network, Russia and CIS.
    18. Eric Dunaway & Felix Munoz-Garcia, 2020. "Campaign contributions and policy convergence: asymmetric agents and donations constraints," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 184(3), pages 429-461, September.
    19. Guido Merzoni & Federico Trombetta, 2016. "The cost of doing the right thing. A model of populism with rent-seeking politicians and the economic crisis," DISEIS - Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo dis1602, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo (DISEIS).
    20. Shin‐Ichi Fukuda, 1992. "Why Does A Two‐Party System Exist?: A New Economic Explanation," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 4(3), pages 277-288, November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Elections; Policy divergence; Probabilistic voting; Voters' preferences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    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:tin:wpaper:20010063. 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: Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tinbenl.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.