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2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

No Polarization in Spite of Primaries: A Median Voter Theorem with Competitive Nominations

Author : Gilles Serra

Published in: The Political Economy of Governance

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

It is commonly assumed that primaries induce candidates to adopt extremist positions. However the empirical evidence is mixed, so a theoretical investigation is warranted. This chapter develops a general model introducing the fundamental elements of primary elections in the well-known spatial voting model by Downs (An economic theory of democracy. Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York, 1957). In spite of significant incentives for candidates to diverge, I find the surprising result that they will all converge to the median voter’s ideal point. The result in this paper suggests that primaries are not sufficient to create polarization by themselves. Rather, for candidates to diverge from the center, other complementary features must be present. An implication is that previous formal results in the literature predicting that primaries lead to polarization probably contain other factors that must be interacting with primaries. Future research should endeavor to disentangle these factors.

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As documented by Carey and Polga-Hecimovich (2006), Kemahlioglu et al. (2009), and Aragón (2013, 2014).

Jones (2012).

Field and Siavelis (2009) and Hinojosa (2012).

Baldez (2008), Hinojosa (2012), and Bruhn (2013, 2014).

Abjorensen et al. (2012).

Ichino and Nathan (2012) and Ichino and Nathan (2013).

Indriðason and Sigurjónsdóttir (2014).

Gherghina (2013).

Field and Siavelis (2009).

Folke et al. (2013).

For example Schumer (2014) in the New York Times.

For notable examples see Gerber and Morton (1998) and Burden (2001, 2004).

Adams and Merrill (2008), Padró i Miquel and Snowberg (2012), Amorós et al. (2013), Casas (2013), Hummel (2013), and Adams and Merrill (2014).

Adams and Merrill (2008), Castanheira et al. (2010), Serra (2011), Evrenk et al. (2013), Mutlu-Eren (2013), Serra (2013), Adams and Merrill (2014), and Kselman (2014).

Adams and Merrill (2008), Serra (2011), Casas (2013), Evrenk et al. (2013), Hummel (2013), Mutlu-Eren (2013), Serra (2013), Adams and Merrill (2014), and Kselman (2014).

Hortala-Vallve and Mueller (2009) and Mutlu-Eren (2013).

Casas (2013) and Hummel (2013).

Crutzen (2013) and Buisseret and Wantchekon (2014).

Hortala-Vallve and Mueller (2009), Serra (2011), Snyder and Ting (2011), Zudenkova (2012), and Serra (2013).

Adams and Merrill (2008), Hirano et al. (2009), Padró i Miquel and Snowberg (2012), Amorós et al. (2013), Casas (2013), Hirano et al. (2013), Hummel (2013), and Adams and Merrill (2014).

Jackson et al. (2007) and Serra (2011, 2013).

All the results would hold for any symmetric and single-peaked utility function for voters. The quadratic is used as an illustration.

This follows the tradition of Wittman (1973) and Calvert (1985).

This unpublished proof is available upon request.

All the results would hold for any strictly concave utility function for parties. They would also hold if the parties’ ideal points were not equidistant from the median voter.

It must be noted that other models of primary elections, some of them withe quite different assumptions, reach similar conclusions. See for example Proposition 2 of Kselman (2014) which finds convergence as a corner solution.

As I mentioned above, the exact same result would be obtained with any strictly concave utility function for parties and voters. Complete convergence can also be proved to be the only possible outcome with strictly risk loving parties. And the parties’ ideal points could take any value on opposite sides of the median voter.

We are thus discarding the possibility of flip-flopping during the election season. One way to justify this assumption is that, in this election, flip-flopping would hurt the candidate’s credibility so much that it would never be an optimal strategy.

This is not an exhaustive list of all the possible configurations. In this section, I only analyze the cases that build an interesting intuition. The proof in the appendix gives the exhaustive list of configurations and determines whether each of them is an equilibrium or not.

Gerber and Morton (1998) and Burden (2001, 2004).

Hirano et al. (2010) and Peress (2013).

I should note how reminiscent this result is to the one found by Calvert (1985). In his seminal model with two policy-motivated parties with extremist ideal points, he famously proved that both parties will completely converge to the median voter’s ideal point. The logic of his result is similar to the one here, and thus my model can be thought of as a generalization of Calvert (1985) to a situation where a nomination process is added in each party. The fact that a convergence to the median still holds in my model illustrates what Calvert called the “robustness” of the spatial voting model.

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Title: No Polarization in Spite of Primaries: A Median Voter Theorem with Competitive Nominations
Author: Gilles Serra
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: The Political Economy of Governance
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15550-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-15551-7

Copyright Year: 2015
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15551-7_11