Abstract
This paper presents a spatial model of primary election to analyze strategic voting and its effect on the policy outcome. Primary voters care for the electability of the candidates as well as their offered policies. The trade off between these two factors might make the preferences of the primary voters non-single-peaked. I show the median voter is still decisive when the preferences are quadratic. Moreover, I use comparative statics and numerical analysis to evaluate the conditions under which the position of the Condorcet winner in the primary election shifts toward the center. Among the conditions that contribute to such a shift are radical policies by the incumbent, public opinion shift toward the incumbent party, and accurate information about the population median.
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Notes
26 % of the Democrats in the Iowa entrance poll stated that the most important quality of the candidate for them is whether he “can beat Bush”. That number in the New Hampshire exit poll was 20 %.
for a deep discussion of strategic voting see Buchanan and Yoon (2006).
For an alternative analysis see Banks and Kiewiet (1989).
More on this can be found at McCartey et al. (2006).
Alternatively Aranson and Ordeshook (1972) has more focus on candidate’s strategic choice of policy.
That is the main difference between my model and Adams and Merrill (2008) too, as they assume primary voters vote sincerely.
This specification is general enough to include many known distribution functions like normal distribution and uniform distribution.
It could potentially affect some results in Sect. 5, depending on the way that party formation is modeled.
Technique is similar to Banks and Duggan (2006).
Those two are the most commonly used necessary conditions for application of the median voter theorem.
The main difficulty is the lack of analytical form for the cumulative distribution function.
According to Banks and Kiewiet (1989) during 70’s and 80’s “over 93% of Incumbent members of congress who seek reelection have been successful”.
At \(z=-\epsilon \) the two candidates have equal chance of winning the general election. But for any small enough \(\delta \), (\(\delta > 0\)), the challenger wins for sure.
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Mirhosseini, M.R. Primaries with strategic voters: trading off electability and ideology. Soc Choice Welf 44, 457–471 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-014-0845-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-014-0845-4