Abstract
We prove an abstract theorem which shows that under certain circumstances, a candidate running for political office should be as explicit as possible in order to improve her impression among the voters. But this result conflicts with the perceived reality that candidates are often cagey and reluctant to take stances except when absolutely necessary. Why this hesitation on the part of the candidates? We offer some explanations.
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Notes
- 1.
If the statements which she has already made constitute a set T, then Z is the set of those states \(\omega \) which satisfy T.
- 2.
Note that we are not making assumptions like single peak preference. The model we use allows for a candidate who is a social conservative and an economic liberal (e.g. Carter), or a socially liberal candidate who is hawkish on foreign policy (Johnson).
- 3.
We assume that the measure of the set of voters is normalized to be 1.
- 4.
Note that the set V is fixed but Z depends on what the candidate has said so far and may say in the future. However, fights between Democrats and Republicans over “illegal voters” or “voter suppression” are over the precise makeup of the set V. A candidate may well seek to increase her average satisfaction by seeking to include in V some members who like her present positions or to exclude those who dislike these positions.
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Parikh, R., Taşdemir, Ç. (2015). The Strategy of Campaigning. In: Beklemishev, L., Blass, A., Dershowitz, N., Finkbeiner, B., Schulte, W. (eds) Fields of Logic and Computation II. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9300. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23534-9_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23534-9_15
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