Reliability and Responsibility: a Theory of Endogenous Commitment

Abstract

A common assumption in Political Science literature is policy commitment: candidates maintain their electoral promises. We drop such assumption and we show that costless electoral campaign can be an effective way of transmitting information to voters. The result is robust to relevant equilibrium refinements. An unavoidable proportion of ambiguous politicians emerges, consistently with empirical findings. JEL Classification: D72, P16, C73