An agenda-setting model of electoral competition

Colomer, Josep-Maria; Llavador, Humberto

doi:10.1007/s13209-011-0056-5

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…This neglects ideology and issue divisiveness. However, we want to argue that our approach (1) is robust to the introduction of some ideology in the voters' decision and (2) usefully complements the analysis of divisive issues by, for example, Colomer and Llavador (), Glazer and Lohmann (1989), and Morelli and Van Weelden (, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Competition through Issue Selection

Aragonès

Castanheira

Giani

2014

American J Political Sci

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Politics must address multiple problems simultaneously. In an ideal world, political competition would force parties to adopt priorities that reflect the voters' true concerns. In reality, parties can run their campaigns in such a way as to manipulate voters' priorities. This phenomenon, known as priming, may allow parties to underinvest in solving the issues that they intend to mute. We develop a model of endogenous issue ownership in which two vote‐seeking parties (a) invest in policy quality to increase the value of their platform and (b) choose a communication strategy to prime voters. We identify novel feedback between communication and investment. In particular, we find that stronger priming effects can constrain parties to invest more resources in all issues. We also identify the conditions under which parties prefer to focus on their “historical issues” or to engage in “issue stealing.”

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Competition through Issue Selection

Aragonès

Castanheira

Giani

2014

American J Political Sci

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“…The literature on politicians' choice of which issues to focus on is relatively small and mainly focuses on salience concerns with fixed candidate policies. Colomer and Llavador (2011), Aragones et al (2015), and Dragu and Fan (2014) all focus on politicians' attempts in campaigns to add salience to issues on which their party has an advantage. 2 More generally, there is a large literature in economics and political science stemming from Holmstrom and Milgrom (1991), on how agents allocate effort across tasks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Elections and Divisiveness: Theory and Evidence

2015

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This article provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of how politicians allocate their time across issues. When voters are uncertain about an incumbent's preferences, there is a pervasive incentive to "posture" by spending too much time on divisive issues (which are more informative about a politician's preferences) at the expense of time spent on common-values issues (which provide greater benefit to voters). Higher transparency over the politicians' choices can exacerbate the distortions. These theoretical results motivate an empirical study of how Members of the US Congress allocate time across issues in their floor speeches. We find that US senators spend more time on divisive issues when they are up for election, consistent with electorally induced posturing. In addition, we find that US house members spend more time on divisive issues in response to higher news transparency.Most citizens want a secure country, a healthy economy, safe neighborhoods, good schools, affordable health care, and good roads, parks, and other infrastructure. These issues do get discussed, of course, but a disproportionate amount of attention goes to issues like abortion, gun control, the Pledge of Allegiance, medical marijuana, and other narrow issues that simply do not motivate the great majority of Americans.-Fiorina, Adams, and Pope (2006, 202) Can't we wait on the things that we're going to yell at each other about and start on the things that we agree on? -Austan Goolsbee, Meet the Press, August 7, 2011 A s the above quotes illustrate, there is a widespread perception that the political process involves excessive amounts of time devoted to narrow and divisive issues. This raises the questions of why politicians spend so much time on these issues and if, as sometimes argued (e.g., Hillygus and Shields 2014), the focus on divisive issues is a response to electoral pressures. We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role of electoral pressures in driving divisive politics.The first contribution of this article is theoretical. We provide a positive theory of incumbent politicians' allocation of time and resources across two policy issues. While commonvalues issues are more important to the voters, voters are unsure of the politician's preferences on divisive issues. The politician has an incentive to overprovide effort on divisive issues, at the expense of common-values issues, to signal that she holds preferences that make her more attractive to the majority of voters. Moreover, this incentive to "posture" is stronger with higher transparency-that is, when voters have more information on the politician's effort choices.The second contribution is empirical. We construct a measure of divisive effort for members of the US Congress using the text of their floor speeches. We then report two new empirical findings. First, we exploit variation in the time to re-election for US senators to demonstrate that senators spend more time on divisive issues when elections are more imminent. Second, we exploit variation in...

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“…Their model can explain issue ownership whereby parties invest in issues where they have comparative advantage on, however, if voters are su¢ ciently susceptible to priming, "issue stealing" is also possible. Other papers that model political campaigns as advertisements that raise salience of an issue include Amorós and Socorro Puy (2007), which predicts issue convergence if one party has an absolute advantage on two issues but little comparative advantage, and Colomer and Llavador (2011), where a challenger proposes an alternative policy on one issue and then the incumbent has a choice whether to defend the status quo or campaign on a di¤erent issue; this paper predicts issue convergence if voters like the status quo enough, but otherwise divergence is possible. In Dragu and Fan (2013), politicians need to divide a …xed budget between several issues; they show that more popular parties are likely to campaign and thereby increase salience of consensual issues, while less popular parties would increase salience of divisive issues.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Single-Issue Campaigns and Multidimensional Politics

Egorov

2015

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In most elections, voters care about several issues, but candidates may have to choose only a few to build their campaign on. The information that voters will get about the politician depends on this choice, and it is therefore a strategic one. In this paper, I study a model of elections where voters care about the candidates' competences (or positions) over two issues, e.g., economy and foreign policy, but each candidate may only credibly signal his competence or announce his position on at most one issue. Voters are assumed to get (weakly) better information if the candidates campaign on the same issue rather than on different ones. I show that the first mover will, in equilibrium, set the agenda for both himself and the opponent if campaigning on a different issue is uninformative, but otherwise the other candidate may actually be more likely to choose the other issue. The social (voters') welfare is a non-monotone function of the informativeness of different-issue campaigns, but in any case the voters are better off if candidates are free to pick an issue rather than if an issue is set by exogenous events or by voters. If the first mover is able to reconsider his choice in case the follower picked a different issue, then politicians who are very competent on both issues will switch. If voters have superior information on a politician's credentials on one of the issues, this politician is more likely to campaign on another issue. If voters care about one issue more than the other, the politicians are more likely to campaign on the more important issue. If politicians are able to advertise on both issues, at a cost, then the most competent and well-rounded will do so. This possibility makes voters better informed and better off, but has an ambiguous effect on politicians' utility. The model and the results may help understand endogenous selection of issues in political campaigns and the dynamics of these decisions.

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An agenda-setting model of electoral competition

Cited by 16 publications

References 24 publications

Electoral Competition through Issue Selection

Electoral Competition through Issue Selection

Elections and Divisiveness: Theory and Evidence

Single-Issue Campaigns and Multidimensional Politics

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