Issue emphasis in political campaigns: Theory and evidence.
详细信息
- 作者：Grypari ; Ioanna Loukia.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2011
- 导师：Phelan, Christopher,eadvisorKocherlakota, Narayanaecommittee memberGoren, Paulecommittee memberPetrin, Amilecommittee member
- 毕业院校：University of Minnesota
- Department：Economics
- ISBN：9781124961231
- CBH：3478483
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：522361
- Pages：74
文摘
The goal of this dissertation is to account for the effects of economic and non-economic issues in political campaigning and election outcomes, both theoretically and empirically. In this first chapter, I build upon the probabilistic voting framework of Lindbeck and Weibull 1987) to create a theory of pre-election competition that considers the significance of both economic and non-economic issues in determining campaigns and voting choices. I endow politicians with two tools for political targeting: binding consumption promises, and campaign time which they can distribute across economic and non-economic issues. Spending time on an issue, or issue emphasis, can be thought of as a signal of the time a politician will spend on that issue once in power and thus changes the salience of that issue in voter payoffs. By introducing issue emphasis, I create a tradeoff amongst economic and non-economic issues in a politicians choice of optimal campaigns. I examine the interaction between the two campaign instruments in equilibrium and their effect on election outcomes as demographic characteristics and population preferences change. In the second chapter, I consider the effect of emphasis on various issues in U.S. Presidential elections from 1952 to 2004. Since political campaigns are determined through political competition given observed and unobserved politician characteristics such as a charisma), I use a version of the structural model from Chapter 1 to account for this endogeneity. Noting the similarity between two campaign-setting political candidates and two price-setting oligopolists, I borrow from the applied microeconomic literature on characteristic-based discrete choice demand estimation to estimate the model. I find that issue emphases on economic policy, political authority and corruption and traditional values issues are all significant determinants of vote choice and the effect of each varies depending on the party and position of a politician, and the unemployment level in the economy.