Electoral Contests over Voter Beliefs

• In Event: Formal Models of Policymaking and Elections

Abstract

Before casting their votes, members of an electorate must assimilate numerous messages about each of potentially several candidates competing for a given office. Furthermore, these messages must contend with voters' preconceived notions of each candidate, all of which are possibly skewed by cognitive biases. We build on recent work to offer a unified framework for understanding the way in which political messages, prior beliefs, and behavioral effects contribute to an individual's subjective perception of a candidate's ideological position. We use this framework to microfound the costs of changing voter beliefs and embed this rich but analytically tractable model of voter belief formation in several different models of electoral competition. While nesting traditional models of spatial competition, our results shed light more broadly on the nature and extent of political messaging and the effect that various influences on a voter's beliefs have on the messages political actors send about candidates. Among other insights, we find that electoral pressures still lead candidates' messages about themselves to converge ideologically, with competition instead occurring over investments in the precision of these messages.

Authors

• Alexander Evert, University of Chicago

• Dan Alexander, University of Rochester