Campaign contests

Law enforcement and political misinformation

“…Before proceeding to the next step, we would like to emphasize that the underlying mechanism driving this result shares similarities with the fundamental findings of studies that investigate the manipulation of issue salience in political campaigns (Amorós and Puy, 2013;Aragonès et al, 2015;Egorov, 2015;Dragu and Fan, 2016;Denter, 2020). According to these papers, a party that possesses issue ownership in a particular area is interested in amplifying that issue's salience (i.e.…”

“…However, one may question how issue ownership can be modeled without considering multiple dimensions, as several theory papers that discuss issue competition (Amorós and Puy, 2013; Aragonès et al, 2015; Egorov, 2015; Dragu and Fan, 2016; Denter, 2020) adopt multidimensional policies. For instance, in those papers, one party possesses issue ownership in a specific policy area, while the other party has ownership in a different policy area.…”

“…Note that in this paper, we assume political competition with a one-dimensional policy space. However, the literature regarding issue ownership theory (Amorós and Puy, 2013; Aragonès et al, 2015; Egorov, 2015; Dragu and Fan, 2016; Denter, 2020) considers a multidimensional policy space and investigates how parties’ issue ownership of different policies affects the incentives of political campaign spending and the electoral results. In Appendix A, we extend our model into a multidimensional setting and show that the main result of our model does not change under an additional condition.…”

“…Third, to investigate the effect of political misinformation, we incorporate a campaign competition stage, where political parties attempt to manipulate voters’ perceptions of crime. The idea is similar to the model of campaign finance (Baron, 1994; Grossman and Helpman, 1996; Meirowitz, 2008) and the model of priming (Amorós and Puy, 2013; Aragonès et al, 2015; Egorov, 2015; Dragu and Fan, 2016; Denter, 2020). In the campaign stage, we show that the two parties attempt to change voters’ perceptions in opposite directions.…”

(Not) Addressing issues in electoral campaigns

“…In fact much of the theoretical analysis on agenda formation highlights the role of campaign funding and its strategic use, proposing models where candidates or parties can affect the preferences of voters by modifying the salience of issues through the allocation of funds (see, e.g. Amorós and Puy, 2013; Aragonès et al, 2015; Dragu and Fan, 2016; Ash et al, 2017; Osório, 2018; Denter, 2020; Balart et al, 2022; Yamaguchi, 2022). Issue convergence or divergence can indeed result from such considerations but, as we will show, they also obtain if candidates do not face any budget constraints.…”