Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Are Voters Cursed When Politicians Conceal Policy Preferences?, Nichole Szembrot

Faculty Scholarship

In campaigns, candidates often avoid taking positions on issues, concealing the policy preferences that would guide them if elected. This paper describes a novel explanation for ambiguity in political campaigns. It develops a model of candidate competition in which policy-motivated candidates can choose whether or not to announce their policy preferences to voters. It applies Eyster and Rabin's (2005) concept of cursed equilibrium, which allows for varying degrees of understanding of the connection between type (policy preference) and strategy (whether to announce). If voters updated according to Bayes' Rule, they would understand that candidates who do not announce positions are …