Last minute policies and the incumbency advantage

Manzoni, Elena and Penczynski, Stefan P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5477-6830 (2018) Last minute policies and the incumbency advantage. German Economic Review, 19 (3). pp. 280-308. ISSN 1468-0475

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Abstract

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, an incumbent and a possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statement may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in his quality, as previously documented by the empirical literature. The distortions arising in equilibrium are decreasing in the incumbent's true competence; however, the distortions may be increasing in the incumbent's expected competence on his signature issue.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	incumbency advantage,electoral competition,information revelation,agenda setting
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Economic Theory Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	21 Dec 2017 06:07
Last Modified:	20 Apr 2023 00:45
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/65798
DOI:	10.1111/geer.12130

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