Competence and ambiguity in electoral competition

Frenkel, Sivan

doi:10.1007/s11127-012-0039-5

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…16 In our experiment, messages coded as "campaign promises" are arguably more precise about future intended behavior than other messages. Previous research has found that while precise messages can be viewed as signals of competence (Frenkel 2014), ambiguity is common and often not punished by voters (Kartik, Van Weelden, and Wolton 2017;Tomz and Van Houweling 2009). We find that higher-quality challengers send more precise messages (Table 8), consistent with Frenkel.…”

Section: Figure 5 Percent Of Messages In Close Elections and Landslidessupporting

confidence: 86%

Campaign Messages, Polling, and Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence

Feltovich

Giovannoni

2022

American J Political Sci

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How do politicians' track records and campaign messaging interact and affect voters' welfare? We analyze this question theoretically and experimentally. In the theoretical model, which we implement in the experiment, politicians choose how much of an economy's resources to allocate to the citizenry-keeping the remainder for themselves-and then face reelection against a challenger. Both incumbents and challengers have private information about their own quality that determines the economy's level of resources. We vary whether candidates can send campaign messages and the level of variability in candidates' quality. We observe that both higher-quality variability and allowing campaigning benefit citizens by allowing them to better select and hold accountable higher-quality officials. Also, when incumbents have performed poorly or when quality variability is high, challengers' negative campaigning (criticizing the incumbent) increases and incumbents' positive campaigning (emphasizing their own strengths) decreases.

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Section: Figure 5 Percent Of Messages In Close Elections and Landslidessupporting

confidence: 86%

Campaign Messages, Polling, and Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence

Feltovich

Giovannoni

2022

American J Political Sci

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“…Voters may associate specific types of policy ambiguity with incompetence and dishonesty, making ambiguity a costly strategy in elections. Frenkel (2014) finds that less-competent candidates are more likely to present ambiguous policy positions compared with competent and experienced candidates. Similarly, Tomz and Van Houweling (2012) show in their experimental work that flip-flopping on issue positions is associated with increased skepticism about candidates' ability to implement promised policies in office.…”

Section: The Consequences Of Ambiguity For Candidates and Votersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voters’ Response to Candidate Ambiguity in U.S. House Elections

Cahill

Stone

2018

American Politics Research

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There is a sizable literature on the causes and effects of candidate positioning in elections. An implication of this research is that candidates present clear issue positions to the electorate and citizens then make voting decisions based on this information. However, if candidates are ambiguous in the positions they take, this may impair voters’ decision-making and prompt voters to punish them for inconsistency. Although there is a growing literature on the effects of candidate and party ambiguity, consensus on the implications of ambiguity for candidates and voters is yet to be achieved. Using data from the 2010 House elections, we find that candidate ambiguity undermines voters’ ability to vote consistent with the spatial logic just as Downs speculated. We also find, in contrast to Downs, that voters punish rather than reward candidate ambiguity. We suggest that a possible mechanism is in voters’ valence ratings of candidates.

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“…Previous literature on uncertainty has focused on imperfect observation of candidate quality, defined as ability to deliver public services efficiently, rather than uncertainty over the state of the platform itself (e.g. Coate (2004); Carrillo and Castanheira (2008);Frenkel (2014)). For example, Carrillo and Castanheira (2008) find that, with asymmetric information over candidate investment in quality, candidates may have an incentive to diverge from the median voter in order to signal their quality.…”

Section: Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model

Ogden

2014

SSRN Journal

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In real-life elections, voters do not have full information over the policy platforms proposed by political parties. Instead, they form (imprecise) beliefs. I propose a new model of partisan competition to represent the interaction of these beliefs with platform selection. Both parties gain more from appealing to the voters with more precise beliefs over their platform. Minority candidates viewed with less precision overall gain relatively more from outliers. Therefore, the Median Voter Theorem is recovered if and only if voters' policy preferences are uncorrelated with the precision of their beliefs about each candidate, and preferences are distributed symmetrically. Otherwise, even election-motivated parties diverge away from each other. As the population becomes polarized in how they form beliefs about politics, they will become polarized on political grounds as well, providing a new explanation for recent political polarization in the United States which, under reasonable assumptions, is more in line with the stylized facts than models with perfect observability.

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Competence and ambiguity in electoral competition

Cited by 16 publications

References 23 publications

Campaign Messages, Polling, and Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence

Campaign Messages, Polling, and Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence

Voters’ Response to Candidate Ambiguity in U.S. House Elections

The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model

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