IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tin/wpaper/20010063.html

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:

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. 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.
    3. Aytimur, R. Emre & Suen, Richard M. H., 2024. "Information Quality, Disagreement and Political Polarisation," MPRA Paper 121112, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    4. 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.
    5. 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.

    More about this item

    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.

    We have no bibliographic 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.

    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.