The Imperfect Beliefs Voting Model

Abstract

In real-life elections, voters do not have full information over the policy platforms proposed by political parties. Instead, they make their vote choice on the basis of (imprecise) subjective beliefs. I propose a new model of partisan competition to represent the interaction of these beliefs with platform selection. Both parties gain more from appealing to the voters with more precise beliefs over their platform. Candidates viewed with less precision overall gain relatively more from outliers, and diverge further from the median. Therefore, the Median Voter Theorem is recovered if and only if voters’ policy preferences are uncorrelated with the precision of their beliefs about each candidate, both candidates are viewed with equal precision, and preferences are distributed symmetrically. Otherwise, even electorally-motivated parties diverge away from each other. Applications of the model show that polarization will be greater when one candidate is substantially more inclusive in their messaging than the other candidate, when one candidate is viewed with greater precision by the population at large, when parties run culturally differentiated candidates, when there is more campaigning, and when inequality is large. These interactions of voter belief formation and candidate characteristics can help fill the remaining residual in our understanding of American political polarization.

Keywords: Cultural Distance; Imperfect Communication; Inequality; Polarization; Policy Divergence; Redistribution; Social Groups; Voter Beliefs

JEL Classification: D72; D83; H20; H50