UCL
EXPLOITING VOTERS' UNCERTAINTY:
DOES PARTY COMPETITION ALWAYS
BENEFIT CITIZENS?
Université
catholique
de Louvain
Margherita Negri, CORE-UCL ([email protected])
Belgique,
Europe et mondialisation:
Quelles équations?
Colloque de Lancement
de l’Institut ISPOLE
13-14 Octobre 2010
QUESTION
FACTS
Summer 2010, France: political debate was centered on
the Roma repatriation problem. Elysee Palace carried
on a roaring campaign to explain how camps were
“sources of illegal trafficking, profoundly shocking living
standards, the exploitation of children for begging,
prostitution and crime”; 80% of the citizens interviewed in
a survey were in favor of it and president Sarkozy has
seen his poll ratings edge up.
BUT, Roma are not such a big issue: they constitute
between the 0.5% and 1% of French population and many
of them have been peacefully and lawfully living in the
country since many years.
A similar debate about social security took place in Italy;
Belgian political debate has focused on the splitting of the
BHV electoral district, which can hardly be seen as the
most important issue in the country (population in BHV
constitute more or less 15% of total population).

WHY DO POLITICIANS FOCUS
ON SMALL ISSUES RATHER
THAN SOLVING THE MOST
IMPORTANT ONES?
WHY NO OPPOSING PARTY
HIGHLIGHTS THE PRESENCE
OF BIGGER PROBLEMS TO BE
SOLVED?
OUR EXPLANATION
If voters' information about the problems within a country can
be influenced by politicians' announcements and if advertising
one problem implies the commitment to solve it once elected,
then politicians might decide to advertise and solve minor
problems, while hiding the most important ones. The effect can
be even worse if adopting an advertisement strategy which is
different from the one chosen by the opponents is interpreted
by voters as a signal of low quality of the politician.
A RATIONAL CHOICE MODEL
To formalize the ideas above, we need a rational choice model with the following characteristics:
 There exist two issues, one more important than the other. Importance is positively correlated with difficulty in solving the issue (higher effort
required or lower probability of solving it for a given level of effort);
 Importance of one issue is unknown to voters and politicians can influence their information through advertisement;
 Voters care about quality of the politician, defined as ability of solving issues and commitment;
 Politicians care about the resolution of the issues, but are also office-motivated and bear the cost of advertising and solving issues;
 The model must be dynamic: what each agent chooses at each step must depend on what has been chosen before;
 Each agent selects and plays the strategy that maximizes her expected utility;
 We look for a subgame perfect (Bayesian?) equilibrium where: the elected politician solves only the smaller issue and advertises that; the
challengers do not advertise the other issue;
PROBLEMS
Constructing a model that contains all the elements described above turns out to be quite a difficult task. Here are the main problems we
encounter:
 commitment problems: the result strongly relies on the fact that elected politicians are committed to solve one issue whenever this is
advertised; on the one hand, this cannot be taken as an assumption, but, on the other hand, it seems extremely difficult to generate this kind of
commitment endogenously;
 voting behavior: there are three ways to model voters' behavior:
I) an incumbent is exogenously given and voters decide to re-elect her if they reached a sufficiently high utility level (retrospective voting) →
how do we define “sufficiently high”? or, in other words, what is the optimal re-election rule? and, in presence of more than two politicians,
which of the challengers will be selected?
II) quality of the politician is a random variable, voters can infer the quality of an exogenously given incumbent by her actions and compare it
with the average quality: if it's higher, they re-elect the incumbent, if not, they choose a challenger → how can voters correctly infer the quality
of the incumbent if the information they have is driven by the politicians? and, in presence of more than two politicians, which of the
challengers will be selected?
III) traditional political competition: there is no exogenously given incumbent, politicians compete for elections by making promises and
voters select the politician they consider best → commitment problems, see above
 beliefs update: in general, rational voters should be able to update their beliefs about the quality of the politician given the information they
acquire. However, this information is driven by politicians themselves.
CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER COMMENTS
The model proves how political competition might not be not be sufficient to guarantee that politicians act in the interest of citizens. The result
relies on the idea that politicians can drive the information voters have. An immediate (and easy) conclusion would stress the importance of
independent and efficient media, but there might be more to say. Indeed, we believe our model could provide theoretical support for the
introduction of long legislatures. Assume the difficult issue takes some time to be solved. Than, in presence of short legislatures (i.e. that
last less than the time required to solve the issue), choosing to solve the difficult issue leads to a sure defeat, while if the legislature is long,
the incumbent will both manage to benefit from the resolution of the issue and have a positive probability of winning.