Abstract
We study a Downsian model of electoral competition, allowing different voters to have different and private valuations of candidatesquality. Unlike models in which the votersvaluations of candidates quality are common and common knowledge and which never admit pure strategy equilibria, in our setup we show existence of both converging and mildly diverging pure strategy equilibria. Perhaps more importantly, we uncover a non-monotonic (U-shaped) relationship between the extent of heterogeneity in votersvaluations and the maximum degree of equilibrium platform differentiation. In particular, we demonstrate that: a) a disagreement among voters on which candidate is better leads to a depoliticized vote, while an agreement on this issue leads to a politicized one; and b) as voters become more heterogeneous in how they evaluate candidatesquality, existence of pure strategy equilibria becomes more likely.
Published as:
Voters' private valuation of candidates' quality
in Journal of Public Economics
December, 2017