A Model of Interest Group Influence in Electoral Campaigns

• In Event: Formal Theories of Democratic Politics

Abstract

We analyze a citizen-candidate model of elections between an incumbent and challenger in which an interest group can fund campaign advertising for the challenger. Whereas the incumbent's position is known to voters, the challenger is relatively unknown, and advertising stochastically informs voters regarding the challenger's position. A voter who is informed about the challenger simply votes for the candidate with the preferred position, but a voter who does not receive the signal faces a complex inference problem: in the absence of a signal, the challenger is more likely to hold a position that is unacceptable to the interest group or (even if she is close to the interest group's ideal point) to be electorally unviable. We prove existence of a perfect Bayesian equilibrium, and we characterize the probability that the majority-preferred candidate wins as a function of the incumbent's position, the budget of the interest group, the pool from which challengers are drawn, and the level of verifiability of information.

Authors

• Zuheir Desai

• John Duggan, University of Rochester