Original
Electoral contests over voter beliefs
Abstract
Abstract Voter perceptions of candidates are the substrate on which campaigns act. It is costly, however, for voters to devote enough attention to politics to change their own perceptions of candidates. This paper views campaigns—and the time, effort, and money they expend—as subsidizing rationally inattentive voters' adoption of new beliefs about candidate platforms. We employ an all‐pay contest to model costly competition over voter perceptions. In our baseline model, campaigns seek to improve perceptions of their own candidates. In a variant, candidates engage in negative campaigning. Among other results, we observe platform divergence under more reasonable informational assumptions than previous spatial models, replacing candidate uncertainty about voters with voter uncertainty about candidates. This model serves as a bridge between behavioral research on campaigns and theoretical literature on elections, offering a richer set of empirical predictions while preserving the insights of the canonical Downsian framework as a limiting case.
中文
围绕选民信念的选举竞争
摘要
选民对候选人的感知是竞选活动赖以行动的基底。然而，选民若投入足够多的注意力于政治以改变自身对候选人的感知，则成本高昂。本文将竞选活动——以及它们所投入的时间、努力和金钱——视为对理性忽视的选民采纳关于候选人政纲的新信念的补贴。我们采用全支付竞赛来建模围绕选民感知的昂贵竞争。在我们的基准模型中，竞选活动寻求改善对自身候选人的感知。在一个变体中，候选人开展负面竞选。除其他结果外，我们在比以往空间模型更合理的信息假设下观察到政纲分歧，即以选民对候选人的不确定性取代候选人对选民的不确定性。该模型在关于竞选的行为研究与关于选举的理论文献之间架起桥梁，提供了更丰富的实证预测，同时将经典唐斯框架的洞见保留为极限情形。
关键词
选举竞争、选民信念、全支付竞赛、理性忽视、负面竞选、政纲分歧、唐斯模型、竞选效果