The welfare implications of electoral polarization

Abstract

I consider the welfare implications of polarization in the preferences of political candidates, for different distributions of voter preferences, in a model of repeated elections. Candidates care about policy and also have an opportunity to engage in rent-seeking when in office. When candidates’ preferences are polarized they choose non-converging policies if elected. This creates policy costs from not securing re-election, decreasing equilibrium rent-seeking, and, for appropriate parameters, increasing voter welfare. I show that increasing polarization among voters increases the range of parameters for which polarization in candidate preferences is socially optimal if only if utility functions are not too concave. Moreover, with multiple dimensions of policy disagreement, it is optimal to have greater polarization of candidate preferences in dimensions in which voters are more polarized if and only if utility functions are not too concave. I discuss the implications of these results for electoral competition in the United States.