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Are voters cursed when politicians conceal policy preferences?

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Abstract

In campaigns, candidates often avoid taking positions on issues, concealing the policy preferences that would guide them if elected. This paper describes a novel explanation for ambiguity in political campaigns. It develops a model of candidate competition in which policy-motivated candidates can choose whether or not to announce their policy preferences to voters. It applies Eyster and Rabin’s (Econometrica 73(5):1623–1672, 2005) concept of cursed equilibrium, which allows for varying degrees of understanding of the connection between type (policy preference) and strategy (whether to announce). If voters updated according to Bayes’ rule, they would understand that candidates who do not announce positions are strategically concealing an unpopular policy preference. In equilibrium, only the most extreme candidates, those located furthest from the median voter’s position, would choose to take no position. However, if voters do not sufficiently appreciate the informational content of a non-announcement, unraveling will not occur and both extremists and more moderate candidates will not announce positions.

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Notes

  1. The median voter theorem (Black 1958) implies that, since majority rule is assumed and preferences are single-peaked, the outcome of the election will be determined by the preference of the median voter; hence, analysis is greatly simplified by focusing on the preference of the median voter. Additionally, assuming that the median voter prefers C is consistent with work done by Anderson and Meagher (2012), who show that, with endogenous party formation in a continuous environment, the parties' moderate boundaries lie on either side of the median voter.

  2. Nothing changes if she instead votes randomly when indifferent.

  3. Allowing a reward from holding office does not change the results of the announcement game. As will be shown below, each candidate will choose the strategy that maximizes his chance of winning the election. Adding a reward from holding office would only increase the difference in utility between the strategy that maximizes winning probability and the other strategy.

  4. A literature in public choice (e.g., Gersbach 1995, 2000) analyzes the conditions under which public information improves collective decisions. In that environment, the outcome delivered by each alternative is uncertain (as are candidate preferences in our model); however, in contrast to our model, the alternatives themselves are not candidates who have strategic incentives to reveal information.

  5. The assumption that candidates are Bayesians matters in the commitment game, because cursed candidates do not correctly predict the policy that would be implemented by an opponent who does not take a position. However, this has a small effect on incentives, only slightly changing the degree of risk aversion that would lead a candidate to choose one strategy over another.

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Ted O’Donoghue, Steve Coate, and Ori Heffetz for their advice and guidance on this work. I also thank Dan Benjamin and Alex Rees-Jones for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. I would also like to thank participants in the Cornell Behavioral Economics Research Group and Cornell Behavioral/Experimental Economics lab meeting and seminar/conference audiences at Cornell University, University of Virginia, Trinity College, Western Economic Association International Annual Conference (2013), Haverford Meeting on Behavioral and Experimental Economics (2013), and Behavioral Models of Politics Conference (2014) for their feedback.

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  1. Department of Economics, Trinity College, 300 Summit St., Hartford, CT, 06106, USA

    Nichole Szembrot

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Correspondence to Nichole Szembrot.

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Szembrot, N. Are voters cursed when politicians conceal policy preferences?. Public Choice 173, 25–41 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-017-0461-9

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