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Public Choice

Erschienen in:

01.04.2014

Competence and ambiguity in electoral competition

verfasst von: Sivan Frenkel

Erschienen in: Public Choice | Ausgabe 1-2/2014

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Abstract

The level of competence that voters attribute to different candidates is an important determinant of election results. In addition, it is observed that some candidates tend to be more ambiguous in their campaigns regarding future plans, while others commit to specific policies. We offer a model where politicians who vary in their level of competence compete by making costly campaign declarations. We show that a separating equilibrium exists in which the ambiguity of a candidate’s campaign declaration reveals her level of competence. The model explains how politicians may use an “issue”-based campaign to create a competent image, and provides an additional explanation for different levels of campaign ambiguity.

Vorheriger Artikel Location, location, location: the Davis-Hinich model of electoral competition

Nächster Artikel A preferential attachment model of campaign contributions in state legislative elections

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Incumbents, however, might have an advantage as voters are familiar with their records (Popkin 1994: 65–67).

For example, the presidential Democratic nominee in 2004, Senator John Kerry, tried to use his decorated military experience in the Vietnam War to signal personal competence and character. However, during his campaign, Kerry was accused of lying during his Vietnam service to attain his medals. The group that criticized Kerry was funded by Republican supporters (for a fraction of the news regarding that incident see “Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Anti-Kerry Ad” by K. Zernike and J. Rutenberg, published August 20, 2004 in The New York Times, and “Navy Says Kerry’s Service Awards Were Properly Approved”, published September 17, 2004 in USA Today).

For a detailed discussion of this issue as well as a survey of the political communication literature see Louden (1994). See also Popkin (1994: 62).

Strategic ambiguity was first introduced to the economic literature by Downs (1957) in his famous remark that candidates “becloud their policies in a fog of ambiguity.” Formal treatment of strategic ambiguity starts with Zeckhauser (1969) and Shepsle (1972). See more in the literature review below.

This argument is supported by the fact that interest groups and politicians from a candidate’s own party often demand that the candidate endorse a certain policy in public, knowing that once a clear declaration is made, the candidate is more committed to that policy. For example, during the 2008 presidential campaign an advertisement paid by a Republican politician challenged the Republican nominee Senator John McCain to speak out on immigration. The advertisement asked McCain whether he is “avoiding this American issue” (“Political Radar”, ABC News website, 4 August 2008).

See, for example, Zeckhauser (1969), Shepsle (1972), Alesina and Cukierman (1990), Glazer (1990), Aragonès and Neeman (2000), Aragonès and Postlewaite (2002), Meirowitz (2005), Callander and Wilson (2008). For details on these papers, see Section 1.1 below.

Potters et al. (1997) present a similar model in which candidates signal policy preferences and not competence. Coate (2004) presents a model where candidates disclose to voters their quality using hard-evidence information campaigns, which are funded by interest groups.

The Online Appendix is available at https://sites.google.com/site/sivanfrenkel/Competence-OnlineAppendix.pdf.

Throughout the paper, we use male pronouns for the voter and female pronouns for the candidates.

The results hold qualitatively even if the utility of choosing appropriately is not equal to the disutility of choosing inappropriately. We let both of these parameters equal 1 for simplicity. If, however, the disutility of making an inappropriate decision equals zero, then the separating equilibrium we later characterize does not exist.

Banks (1990) states that such a cost can be thought of as a reduced form of the payoffs in a dynamic model with repeated elections (p. 311). That line of reasoning also fits here.

In a separating equilibrium where both candidates have low competence, receive opposite signals (s _j=a while s _−j=b), and the elected candidate does not discover the state of the world, the winner is indifferent between both policies. To simplify the analysis, we assume that in such a case the winner chooses the policy she declared in her campaign.

Notice that if there were a positive probability of electing the less competent candidate when the more competent candidate was present, then the less competent candidate could have chosen \(x\ne\tilde{x}\) even if her post-election signal was not informative. Since the voter is fully rational, however, the probability of such an event is zero.

For ease of exposition, we assume that if the candidate is indifferent then she chooses m=0.

This is Type III in Tomz and van Houweling (2009), which they term “Straddle tie”.

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Titel: Competence and ambiguity in electoral competition
verfasst von: Sivan Frenkel
Publikationsdatum: 01.04.2014
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Public Choice / Ausgabe 1-2/2014
Print ISSN: 0048-5829
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-7101
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0039-5

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