Elections, Information, and State‐Dependent Candidate Quality

Abstract

The quality of political candidates often depends on the current state of the world, for example because their personal characteristics are more valuable in some situations than in others. We explore the implications of state-dependent candidate quality in a model of electoral competition where voters are uncertain about the state. Candidates are fully informed and completely office-motivated. With a reasonable restriction on voters' beliefs, an equilibrium where candidates' positions reveal the true state does not exist. Nonrevealing equilibria always exist. Some main findings are that candidates' positions can diverge more in equilibrium when they differ more in state-dependent quality and when the electorate is less well informed.

A Theory of Communication in Political Campaigns

“…The paper also relates to a literature studying models in which candidates have different characteristics, for example Groseclose (2001), Jensen (2012) or a series of papers by Krasa andPolborn (2012, 2010a,b). In all these papers, the focus is on sorting out how certain differences between candidates influences policy choices in equilibrium.…”