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Full-Text Articles in Models and Methods
Electoral Poaching And Party Identification, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson
Electoral Poaching And Party Identification, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
This article studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of `party strength' based on the sizes and intensities of a party's loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties' strengths. In equilibrium, parties target or `poach' a strict subset of the opposition party's loyal voters: offering those voters a high expected transfer, while `freezing out' the remainder with a zero transfer. The size of the subset of opposition voters frozen out and, consequently, the level of inequality in …