Strategic dissent in the Hotelling-Downs model with sequential entry and private information

Description

We analyze the Hotelling-Downs model of winner-take-all elections with sequential entry, where N ≥ 2 office-seeking candidates with privately known qualities choose entry decisions and commit to policy platforms upon entering. Voters receive informative public signals about the quality of each candidate once all platforms are announced. We first characterize two-party equilibria when the order of entry is exogenously given. In these equilibria, entry can occur in any round with positive probability: high-quality candidates signal their type by expressing ideological dissent from voters, while low-quality candidates randomize between mis-signaling quality through dissent and staying out. Interestingly, while informative public signals can deter low-quality candidates from entering up to a certain point, electoral competition itself enhances voter information about candidate types beyond what signals alone can reveal. However, this endogenous mechanism of strategic information transmission leads to political polarization. We then endogenize the order of entry to show that high-quality candidates either enter early or late, while low-quality candidates either stay out or enter late. Moreover, while extremism continues to act as a signal of quality, there is a tendency toward gradual ideological moderation over time, although information revelation is non-monotonic, with full revelation for early and late entrants and only partial revelation for intermediate entrants.

Publication Date

1-1-2014

Publisher

IAS School of Social Sciences

Keywords

Sequential entry, Unobserved quality, Strategic dissent, Polarization, Endogenous Order

Source Link URL

https://www.sss.ias.edu/files/papers/econpaper106.pdf

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