Costs of Change, Political Polarization, and Re-Election Hurdles

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe develop and study a two-period model of political competition with office-and policymotivated candidates, in which (i) changes of policies impose costs on all individuals and (ii) such costs increase with the magnitude of the policy change. We show that there is an optimal positive level of costs of change that minimizes policy polarization and maximizes welfare. One interpretation of this finding is that societies with intermediate levels of conservatism achieve the highest welfare and the lowest polarization levels. We apply our model to the design of optimal re-election hurdles. In particular, we show that raising the vote-share needed for re-election above 50% weakly reduces policy polarization and tends to increase welfare. Furthermore, we identify circumstances where the optimal re-election hurdle is strictly larger than 50%.

A Dynamic Model of Electoral Competition with Costly Policy Changes

“…In Gersbach et al (2015), the impact of such costs is studied in a two-period model. Here we are interested in the long-term behavior of political competition with costs of change.…”

Co-voting democracy

“…A first description of the use of a first voting round by a subset of the voters to lower the number of undesirable parliamentary initiatives in direct democracy is given inGersbach et al (2015) andGersbach (2015). This procedure is a variant that is also applicable in representative democracies.5 On the use of randomly-selected participants for deliberative groups and selection to office by lot, seeFishkin (2009) andManin (1997).…”