Punching Above One’s Weight – the Case Against Election Campaigns

Punching above Ones Weight The Case against choice Campaigns Marco A. Haan? University of Groningen Bart Los University of Groningen Sander Onderstal† University of Amsterdam Yohanes E. Riyanto‡ Nanyang Technological University Singapore June 11, 2010 summary Politicians di?er in their expertness to implement some policy. In an election, candidates make commitments regarding the plans they will try to implement if elected. These serve as a signal of accredited ability. In equilibrium, candidates make ambitious promises. The candidate with the highest ability wins. Yet, the electorate may be better o? having a random candidate implement her best plan, kinda than seeing the winner implementing an overambitious plan. This is more likely if the ability distribution is skewed toward high values, the number of candidates is high, with private bene?ts from universe elected, or if parties select candidates. Keywords: election promises, signalling JEL classi?cation: D72 Corresponding author. Economics Department, P.O. stripe 800, 9700 AV Groningen, the Netherlands. m.a.haan@rug.nl † Onderstal gratefully acknowledges ?nancial support from the Dutch National scientific discipline Foundation (NWO-VICI 453.03.606).

‡ The authors thank participants in the Far Eastern coming together of the Econometric Society in Beijing (2007) and the Public pickax Society World Meeting in Amsterdam (2007) for useful comments on earlier drafts. ? 1 1 Introduction When studying elections, models in political economic system tend to focus on the position on which election candidates run. If candidates can choose that position, Hotelling (1929) and Downs (1957) showed that in the case of two candidates twain will choose the position of the median voter. Haan and Volkerink (2001) show that the alike is true with more than 2 candidates in a run-o? system. If the true ideological position of a candidate is known and citizens dissolve whether or not to run for election, we face a numerousness of equilibria (see... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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