Ideology as Opinion: A Spatial Model of Common-Value Elections

McMurray, Joseph

doi:10.1257/mic.20160040

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…There are three pieces of weak evidence against a more general relationship between overconfidence and conservatism. The first piece is noted in Section 3.3: if overconfidence and results: see McMurray (2012). In particular, with only two states, the precision of beliefs may decrease, rather than increase with more signals.…”

Section: Appendix-20mentioning

confidence: 97%

Overconfidence in Political Behavior

Ortoleva

Snowberg

2015

American Economic Review

299

172

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Without heterogeneity in ideology-preferences and opinions over political actions-there would be little need for the institutions studied by political economists.1 However, the sources of ideology have received scant attention: since Marx, political economists have largely viewed ideology as driven by wealth or income-despite the fact that these variables explain little of the variation in ideology ( This paper proposes a complementary theory in which differences in ideology are also due to imperfect information processing. This theory predicts that overconfidence in one's own beliefs leads to ideological extremeness, increased voter 1 Without heterogeneity, institutions will still be useful for coordination (Weingast 1997). Traditionally, opinions have not been considered part of ideology; however, recent work has provided compelling arguments that ideology should include some beliefs (McMurray 2013a, b).

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Section: Appendix-20mentioning

confidence: 97%

Overconfidence in Political Behavior

Ortoleva

Snowberg

2015

American Economic Review

299

172

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“… The common versus private‐value distinction arises in a comparison with work by McMurray (). He considered voters who receive private signals of an ideal policy, and candidates learn from the election.…”

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confidence: 99%

A Theory of Protest Voting

Myatt

2016

The Economic Journal

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The supporters of a mainstream candidate contemplate voting for a special‐issue minority party (which risks opening the door to a disliked opponent) in order to influence mainstream policy. Protest voting reacts negatively to expectations about others' enthusiasm for the protest issue, more so if the candidate learns from the protest and responds endogenously. I find that electoral support for single‐issue protest parties can be negatively related to the true underlying enthusiasm for their causes. The risk that the candidate loses office are maximised when the expected enthusiasm for the protest issue makes the candidate indifferent ex ante to accepting the protesters' demands.

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“…Thus, it is obviously true that if one could implement the first policy in the first set of states and the second policy in the second set of states, one would be better off than implementing a single policy in all states, irrespective of risk preferences. McMurray () allows for state‐contingent policies, as we do in our article. He studies a pure common value setting and shows that Nash voting leads to convergent policies when parties can commit and are office motivated, which is inefficient because policies do not match the state.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Retrospective Voting and Party Polarization

Esponda

Pouzo

2018

Int Economic Review

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We provide a new and favorable perspective on voter naiveté and party polarization. We contrast sophisticated (Nash) versus retrospective voting in a model where two parties commit to policies. Retrospective voters do not understand the mapping between states and outcomes induced by a policy; instead, they simply vote for the party that delivers the highest observed performance, as determined in equilibrium. We show that parties have an incentive to polarize under retrospective, compared to Nash, voting. Moreover, this polarization often results in higher welfare due to a better match between policies and fundamentals. * Manuscript

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Ideology as Opinion: A Spatial Model of Common-Value Elections

Cited by 17 publications

References 75 publications

Overconfidence in Political Behavior

Overconfidence in Political Behavior

A Theory of Protest Voting

Retrospective Voting and Party Polarization

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