Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Working Paper Series,
Research Institute of Industrial Economics

No 568: Campaigning and Ambiguity when Parties Cannot Make Credible Election Promises

Andreas Westermark ()
Additional contact information
Andreas Westermark: Uppsala University, Postal: Department of Economics, P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden

Abstract: This paper studies a model of how political parties use resources for campaigning to inform voters. Each party has a predetermined ideology drawn from some distribution. Parties choose a platform and campaign to inform voters about the platform. We find that, the farther away parties are from each other (on average), the less resources are spent on campaigning (on average). Thus, if parties are extreme, less information is supplied than if parties are moderate. We also show that if a public subsidy is introduced, we have policy convergence, given some mild technical restrictions on the public subsidy.

Keywords: Political Parties; Campaigning

JEL-codes: C72; D72; D89

42 pages, November 20, 2001

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