Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/18912 
Year of Publication: 
2004
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 1274
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
We develop a dynamic two-party political economy framework, in which parties seek to maximize vote share and face the trade-off between catering to their respective core constituencies on the one hand and ?middle of the road? voters with no partisan affiliation on the other hand. In contrast to ideology-driven individuals, ?middle of the road? voters care about the state of the economy in the sense that a policy reform is desirable for them when the fundamentals of the economy change. However, information is 'sticky? in the sense that the process of information diffusion about the state of the economy, which is determined by some exogenous stochastic process, is imperfect. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we show that an increase in ideological polarization may enhance social welfare by mitigating the friction in information flow.
Subjects: 
ideological polarization
sticky information
partisanship
policy reform
JEL: 
D80
D72
H30
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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