Working Papers

• Economic inequality, political polarization and voter turnout [Draft]

Rising economic inequality has often been associated to either increasing political polarization or decreasing voter turnout. The first link has strong empirical support, while for the second one the evidence is mixed. In this paper, I propose a theoretical model of political competition and provide a unified explanation for these trends, by accounting for the deep interconnections between inequality, polarization and turnout. The direct effect of inequality on turnout is not straightforward. When candidates' polarization is initially low, rising economic inequality tends to decrease turnout; the opposite is true for initially high polarization. However, an increase in inequality also induces candidates to adapt their platforms and increases polarization, which has an indirect effect on participation. Finally, although inequality increases the demand for redistribution in the electorate, because of higher polarization, it may provide an advantage to the candidate who proposes less redistribution.

• Polarization in a multidimensional political space [Draft]

In recent years, conflicts on social issues, such as civil and LGBTQ rights, immigration, environmental protection, ethnic minority issues and many others, have risen, adding a new dimension to the political debate. In this paper, I study how candidates’ polarization on economic issues is affected by the existence of a second dimension along which voters are divided. I show that, even if voters’ preferences along the two dimensions are independent, candidates’ positions are not. Moreover, when the population is more divided on the social dimension, candidates tend to adopt more ambiguous positions there, which allows them to polarize more on the economic policies. Finally, if voters’ preferences on the two dimensions are correlated, candidates’ platforms may diverge on both the economic and the social dimensions.

• Ignorance is bliss. Can politicians really know the preferences of their voters? [Draft available upon request]

The observation that politicians do not seem to know the political preferences of their voters has often been considered as a puzzle. In this paper, I provide an explanation that reconciles this evidence with the theory, by taking into account voters’ incentives to reveal their preferences. I develop a spatial model of electoral competition with probabilistic voting. Politicians are initially uninformed about voters’ policy preferences, which can be directly revealed by voters through cheap talk. I show that, since their interests typically do not coincide with the ones of politicians, voters do not provide precise information about their preferences, thus contributing to politicians’ misperceptions. Moreover, the amount of information transmitted depends on certain characteristics of the electorate, such as the relative size and political power of different groups of voters. Finally, I show that the perceived polarization of voters’ preferences exacerbates the conflict between the politicians’ and voters’ interests and undermines informative communication between them.