Ideological Competition

• In Event: Political Competition and Conflict

Abstract

We model political competition not over policy programs, but over ideologies: models of the world that organize voters’ experiences and guide the inferences they draw from observed outcomes. Policy-motivated political parties develop ideologies, and voters choose the ideology that best explains their observations. Preferences over policies are then induced by the adopted ideology. We show that in equilibrium political parties always propose different models of the world. This divergence extends to all features of the environment, not just policy dimensions. The degree of divergence on policy dimensions increases after periods of policy stability and falls after periods of policy change.

Authors

• Federica Izzo, UCSD

• Gregory John Martin, Stanford University

• Steven Callander, Stanford University