Two-candidate Elections Research Articles

Stakeholder perspectives on interventions to improve HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis uptake and continuation in Lesotho: A participant-ranked preferences study.

Low uptake and high discontinuation remain major obstacles to realizing the potential of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in changing the trajectory of the HIV epidemic. We conducted a card sorting and ranking exercise with 155 local stakeholders to determine their views on the most important barriers and most promising interventions to achieving high PrEP coverage. Stakeholders were a purposive sample of PrEP policymakers and implementing partners (n = 7), healthcare providers (n = 51), and end-users (n = 97). End-users included adults who were currently using PrEP (n = 55), formerly using PrEP (n = 36), and those who were offered PrEP but declined (n = 6). Participants sorted pre-selected interventions and barriers to PrEP coverage into three piles-most, somewhat, and least important. Participants then ranked interventions and barriers in the "most important" piles in ascending order of significance. Ranked preferences were analyzed as voting data to identify the smallest set of candidates for which each candidate in the set would win in a two-candidate election against any candidate outside the set. Participants viewed a lack of PrEP awareness as the most important barrier to PrEP uptake for women, and a fear of HIV testing for men. Community-based HIV testing was ranked as the most promising intervention to improve PrEP uptake for both men and women. Perceived or experienced stigma was seen as an important barrier for PrEP continuation for both men and women, with an additional important barrier for men being daily activities that compete with the time needed to take a daily pill. Adherence counseling and multi-month PrEP prescriptions were seen as the most promising interventions to improve PrEP continuation. Our findings suggest community-based activities that generate PrEP demand (community-based HIV testing and mass media campaigns), reinforced with facility-based follow-up (counseling and multi-month prescription) could be promising interventions for PrEP programs that are aimed at the general adult population.

When Do Politicians Use Populist Rhetoric? Populism as a Campaign Gamble

ABSTRACT Why do some politicians employ populist rhetoric more than others within the same elections, and why do the same politicians employ more of it in some elections? Building on a simple formal theoretical model of two-candidate elections informed by the ideational approach to populist communication, we argue that the initially less popular political actors are more likely to use populist rhetoric in a gamble to have at least some chance of winning. To test the empirical implications of our argument, we construct the most comprehensive corpus of U.S. presidential campaign speeches (1952–2016) and estimate the prevalence of populist rhetoric across these speeches with a novel automated text analysis method utilizing active learning and word embedding. Overall, we show the robustly greater use of populism among the presidential candidates with the lower polling numbers regardless of their partisanship or incumbency status.

Campaigning on the Ability to Govern: A Study of Strategic References to Competence Made by Political Parties in Europe

AbstractOne of the sources of the incumbent advantage over the challenger in a two-candidate election is the possibility of referring to accomplishments in office. Incumbents exploit this resource in their campaigning rhetoric by putting greater emphasis on competence than challengers do. However, this tendency has not been tested outside two-party systems yet. In multiparty settings, the outgoing government, often formed by a coalition of parties, faces multiple opposition forces. This can change the strategic context of the competition, so the generalizations made in two-party systems may not be adequate. Using the Comparative Campaign Dynamics Dataset, I demonstrate that the tendency to put more emphasis on competence does not apply to government parties in multiparty elections in Europe. However, parties with better positions in the pre-electoral polls are more likely to emphasize traits associated with the ability to govern efficiently during the campaign.

Extreme donors and policy convergence

We consider a two-candidate election model with campaign contributions. In the first stage of the game, each of the two candidates chooses a policy position. In the second stage, each of n donors chooses the amount of contribution to each candidate. The winning probability of each candidate depends on the total amount of contributions that she raises from the donors. In any equilibrium of our model, only extreme donors contribute at any subgame, and the policies converge on the unique equilibrium path. Our results suggest that extreme donors and their contributions do not necessarily cause policies to diverge.

It’s My Party and I’ll Vote How I Want to: Experimental Evidence of Directional Voting in Two-Candidate Elections

The competing theories of proximity and directional voting have long been used to model voting behavior. Empirically evaluating these theories, however, requires knowledge of voters’ utilities, which are inherently unobserved. Empiricists have generally dealt with this by using self-reports of utility. Yet, self-reports are likely biased, leaving experimental predictions at odds with real-world election outcomes. We improve upon this method by constructing a discrete choice model which is able to measure the likelihood of any one voter exhibiting proximity voting behavior as opposed to directional voting behavior, without needing to know voters’ utilities. We subsequently conduct a voting experiment with over 1,800 participants to estimate the parameters of the model. Our results suggest that, among voters whose expected behavior differs across the two theories, there is an approximately even split between voting behaviors, and the probability of exhibiting proximity voting behavior decreases by roughly 10 percentage points for each step away from the midpoint of a (−10 to +10) political spectrum. Our results are robust across two measures of preferences and four candidate pairings. The outcomes of our experiment are also consistent with the results of the 2012 Presidential Election, which took place the day after our experiment closed.

Hierarchies and Promotions in Political Institutions: Accountability and Selection

Hierarchies are pervasive in political settings. From judges to elected politicians, from activists to bureaucrats, political agents compete to be promoted to higher positions. This paper studies political tournaments and their impact on key aspects of political performance: accountability and selection. While greater tournament size discourages effort, it improves selection. We also discuss the optimal design of tournament as a function of the principal’s objectives and features of the environment. We find that tournaments of size two (such as two-candidate elections) are generally suboptimal. Our analysis also highlights that more desirable promotion always increases effort, but reduces the optimal tournament size under some conditions. Our paper provides a host of other comparative statics.

On distribution of the leadership time in counting votes and predicting winners

In two-candidate election the votes are counted in random order. Suppose that candidate A was the leader until the 9th vote. How may we use this information in predicting the future winner? To this aim we derive distributions of the first leadership time both for the winner and loser. Our conclusion is rather surprising.

Policy convergence in a two-candidate probabilistic voting model

We propose a generalization of the probabilistic voting model in two-candidate elections. We allow the candidates have general von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions defined over the voting outcomes. We show that the candidates will choose identical policy positions only if the electoral competition game is constant-sum, such as when both candidates are probability-of-win maximizers or vote share maximizers, or for a small set of functions that for each voter define the probability of voting for each candidate, given candidate policy positions. At the same time, a pure-strategy local Nash equilibrium (in which the candidates do not necessarily choose identical positions) exists for a large set of such functions. Hence, if the candidate payoffs are unrestricted, the “mean voter theorem” for probabilistic voting models is shown to hold only for a small set of probability of vote functions.

Does Deceptive Advertising Reduce Political Participation? Theory and Evidence

We model two-candidate elections in which 1) voters are uncertain about candidates' attributes; and 2) candidates can inform voters of their attributes by sending advertisements. We compare political campaigns with truthful advertising to campaigns in which there is a small chance of deceptive advertising. Our model predicts that voters should vote in-line with an advertisement’s information. We test our model’s predictions using laboratory elections. We find, in the presence of an even small probability that an advertisement is deceptive, voters become substantially more likely to elect a “low-quality” candidate. We discuss implications of this for existing models of voting decisions.

The equivalence between costly and probabilistic voting models

In costly voting models, voters abstain when a stochastic cost of voting exceeds the benefit from voting. In probabilistic voting models, they always vote for a candidate who generates the highest utility, which is subject to random shocks. We prove an equivalence result: In two-candidate elections, given any costly voting model, there exists a probabilistic voting model that generates winning probabilities identical to those in the former model for any policy announcements, and vice versa. Thus many predictions of interest established in one of the models hold in the other as well, providing robustness of the conclusions to model specifications.

Candidate quality in a Downsian model with a continuous policy space

This paper characterizes a unique mixed strategy Nash equilibrium in a one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections with a continuous policy space, where candidates are office motivated and one candidate enjoys a non-policy advantage over the other candidate. We show that if votersʼ utility functions are concave and the median voter ideal point is drawn from a unimodal distribution, there is a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium where the advantaged candidate chooses the ideal point of the expected median voter with probability one and the disadvantaged candidate uses a mixed strategy that is symmetric around it. Existence conditions require the variance of the distribution to be small enough relative to the size of the advantage.

Does Deceptive Advertising Reduce Political Participation? Theory and Evidence

We examine the effect of deceptive advertising on voting decisions in elections. We model two-candidate elections in which 1) voters are uncertain about candidates' attributes; and 2) candidates can inform voters of their attributes by sending advertisements. We compare political campaigns with truthful advertising to campaigns in which there is a small chance of deceptive advertising. Our theoretical model predicts that informed voters should act on the information contained in the advertisement. Thus, even in deceptive campaigns, informed voters should either vote for the candidate from whom they received an advertisement or abstain from voting; they should never vote for the opposing candidate. We test our model in laboratory elections, and, as predicted, find higher participation among informed voters in elections that allow only for truthful advertisement than in elections that permit deceptive advertising. Contrary to our theoretical predictions, we find substantial differences in voting behavior between truthful and deceptive campaigns. When faced with a small probability of deception, informed voters in deceptive campaigns vote for the candidate who did not send an advertisement, thereby making sub-optimal voting choices. Even when there is only a small chance that an advertisement is deceptive, voters are more likely to elect the candidate who generates less welfare.

Banzhaf voting power, random elections, and the Electoral College winner’s advantage

In a recent article, Riggs et al. (2009) aim to measure the ‘Electoral College winner's advantage’—in particular, the extent to which the winner’s electoral vote margin of victory is magnified as a result of (i) the ‘two electoral vote add-on’ given to each state and (ii) the ‘winner-take-all’ mode of casting state electoral votes. Their results are based on two sets of one million simulated two-candidate elections. This note has two purposes. The first is to demonstrate that RHR’s simulation estimates can be calculated precisely using the theory of voting power measurement. The second is to correct several flaws in RHR’s analysis, the most substantial of which pertains to the effect of the two electoral vote add-on, which actually has a negative effect on the winner’s advantage.

Redistributive Politics and Market Efficiency: An Experimental Study

We study the interaction between competitive markets that produce large but unequally distributed welfare gains and elections through which the poor majority can redistribute income away from the rich minority. In our simple laboratory democracy, subjects first earn their income by trading in a double auction market and thereafter vote on redistributive policies in two-candidate elections. In addition, in one of the treatments subjects can attempt to influence the candidates’ policy choices by transferring money to them. We observe very high levels of redistribution – even when transfers to candidates are possible – with little effect on market efficiency. Overall, the experimental results are explained by our equilibrium predictions.

Decisiveness of contributors’ perceptions in elections

We consider a model of two-candidate elections with a one-dimensional policy space. Spending on campaign advertisements can directly influence voters’ preferences, and contributors give the money for campaign spending in exchange for promised services if the candidate wins. We find that the winner of the election depends crucially on the contributors’ beliefs about who is likely to win and the contribution market tends toward nonsymmetric equilibria in which one of the two candidates has no chance of winning. If the voters are only weakly influenced by advertising or if permissible campaign spending is small, then the candidates choose policies close to the median voter’s ideal point, but the contributors still determine the winner. Uncertainty about the Condorcet winning point (or its nonexistence) can change these results and generate equilibria in which both candidates have substantial probabilities of winning.

A Spatial Theory of Media Slant and Voter Choice

We develop a theory of media slant as a systematic filtering of political news that reduces multidimensional politics to the one-dimensional space perceived by voters. Economic and political choices are interdependent in our theory: expected electoral results influence economic choices, and economic choices in turn influence voting behaviour. In a two-candidate election, we show that media favouring the front-runner will focus on issues unlikely to deliver a surprise, while media favouring the underdog will gamble for resurrection. We characterize the socially optimal slant and show that it coincides with the one favoured by the underdog under a variety of circumstances. Balanced media, giving each issue equal coverage, may be worse for voters than partisan media.

VOTERS' FICKLENESS: A MATHEMATICAL MODEL

This paper presents a spatial agent-based model in order to study the evolution of voters' choice during the campaign of a two-candidate election. Each agent, represented by a point inside a two-dimensional square, is under the influence of its neighboring agents, located at a Euclidean distance less than or equal to d, and under the equal influence of both candidates seeking to win its support. Moreover, each agent located at time t at a given point moves at the next timestep to a randomly selected neighboring location distributed normally around its position at time t. Besides their location in space, agents are characterized by their level of awareness, a real a ∈ [0, 1], and their opinion ω ∈ {-1, 0, +1}, where -1 and +1 represent the respective intentions to cast a ballot in favor of one of the two candidates while 0 indicates either disinterest or refusal to vote. The essential purpose of the paper is qualitative; its aim is to show that voters' fickleness is strongly correlated to the level of voters' awareness and the efficiency of candidates' propaganda.

Why candidate divergence should be expected to be just as great (or even greater) in competitive seats as in non-competitive ones

Basic Downsian theory predicts candidate convergence toward the views of the median voter in two-candidate elections. Common journalistic wisdom, moreover, leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to be strongest when elections are expected to be close. Yet, the available evidence from the US Congress disconfirms this prediction. To explain this counterintuitive result, we develop a spatial model that allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competition, partisan loyalties, and incentives for voter turnout that can lead office-seeking candidates, especially candidates in close elections, to emphasize policy appeals to their voter base rather than courting the median voter.

Redistributive Politics and Market Efficiency: An Experimental Study

We study the interaction between competitive markets that produce large but unequally distributed welfare gains and elections through which the poor majority can redistribute income away from the rich minority. In our simple laboratory democracy, subjects first earn their income by trading in a double auction market and thereafter vote on redistributive policies in two-candidate elections. In addition, in one of the treatments subjects can attempt to influence the candidates’ policy choices by transferring money to them. We observe very high levels of redistribution - even when transfers to candidates are possible - with little effect on market efficiency. Overall, the experimental results are explained by our equilibrium predictions.

Flip-Flopping: Ideological Adjustment Costs in the United States Senate

Models of electoral competition in which candidates can change position at no cost predict the convergence of platforms in a two-candidate election. Such convergence is at odds with empirical observation. In this paper, I undertake a study of candidate positioning in the United States Senate and determine the extent to which electoral costs associated with changing position explain the ideological positions taken by Senators. Using over 50 years of roll call voting data, I use a simulated method of moments approach to estimate a dynamic model of candidate positioning for U.S. Senators. The findings support a model in which Senators face convex costs to changing position, with the best fitting model being one with linear costs of adjustment. The model thus predicts severe punishments for flip-flopping Senators (those who make large changes in position). As a result of the significant costs associated with adjusting position, the empirical validity of the Median Voter Theorem (which depends upon candidates being able to change position at no cost) is called into question.