Last Minute Policies and the Incumbency Advantage
University of Milan Bicocca Department of Economics, Management and Statistics Working Paper No. 229
26 Pages Posted: 22 Jul 2013
There are 2 versions of this paper
Last Minute Policies and the Incumbency Advantage
Date Written: January 1, 2013
Abstract
This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two-period electoral campaign with two policy issues, a specialized incumbent and an unspecialized, but 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 the quality of the incumbent, as previously documented by the empirical literature. However, we show that this implies a non-monotonicity in the distortions that arise in equilibrium.
Keywords: Incumbency advantage, electoral competition, information revelation, agenda setting
JEL Classification: D72, D82, D60
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation