Sincere vs Strategic Voting: Is Irrationality Contagious?

• In Event: Emotions, Beliefs, and Political Behavior in Pluralistic Societies

Abstract

Members of different political parties can influence each other, for instance, in their preferences for a party platform. However, the ability and willingness to react to each other depends on their sophistication, meaning whether they are sincere or strategic, which is akin to being boundedly rational or fully rational. This formal model studies the policies chosen by two parties in competition when one of them has a certain probability of having sincere members while the other one is sure to have strategic members. Each party is conceived as a collection of individual members with heterogeneous preferences that choose the campaign platform in a closed primary election. I find that a party composed of sincere members will tend to be extremist. However, surprisingly, the extremism of the sincere party will have a contagious effect on the rival strategic party: as the expectation that members of the former party are sincere increase, the extremism of the party with strategic voters also increases. Hence the expectation of sincere voting in one of the primaries will pull both parties away from the center. This increases polarization and makes government policy more volatile. These results engage in the empirical debate about whether primaries produce significant polarization or not. My theoretical results indicate that primaries may produce very large polarization, or none at all, depending on a parameter that has been previously neglected in statistical and theoretical studies: the sophistication of primary voters.

Author

• Gilles Serra, CIDE (Centro de Investigacion y Docencia Economicas)