Research

Completed papers

Dynamic Party Behavior With Endogenous Voter Preferences (submitted)

Can parties be more polarized than voters? I address this enduring question using a dynamic model of electoral competition with impressionable voters, i.e., their preferences are influenced by parties’ past actions. I identify polarizing feed- back effects. Either party may endorse unpopular policies to shape future voter preferences. Therefore, parties may polarize at levels of public opinion that would not trigger polarization if they were myopic. For example, when most voters are centrist, but manipulable. I call this self-reinforced polarization: parties polarize because of the polarization they will foster.

Working papers

The Ordering Matters: Consensus and Confrontation in Electoral Campaigns (with Anke Gerber)

New version coming soon.

We present a dynamic model of party competition where the order of moves is endogenous. During the campaign two ideologically and office motivated parties sequentially announce policy positions on two political issues. There is no pre-defined order of moves: any party can address any issue at any moment, and elections happen when parties stop making announcements. We characterize parties’ equilibrium behavior for different types of electorate. When vote shares are independent of the order in which parties have announced their positions, so is the equilibrium—parties may end up confronted on none, one of both issues depending on voter preferences. However, when vote shares depend on the order of announcement– e.g. when voters have a short-memory and only pay attention to the last issue addressed–multiple equilibria arise for different orderings. In our setting, parties compete to make the first move because they can alter the opponent’s future behavior in a way that benefits them. Then, variables such as which issue becomes controversial or the policy implemented depends on which party initiates the game.

 Work in Progress

Polarization For Exploration (with Gema Lax).

Identifying Feedback Effects in the Lab