Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/233811 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Citation: 
[Journal:] Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization [ISSN:] 1879-1751 [Volume:] 168 [Publisher:] Elsevier [Place:] Amsterdam [Year:] 2019 [Pages:] 132-165
Publisher: 
Elsevier, Amsterdam
Abstract: 
While scholars and pundits alike have expressed concern regarding the increasingly “tribal” nature of political identities, there has been little analysis of how this social polarization impacts political selection. In this paper, we incorporate social identity into a principal-agent model of political representation and characterize the impact of social polarization on voting behavior. We show that identity has an instrumental impact on voting, as voters anticipate that political representatives’ ex post policy decisions have an in-group bias. We also conduct a laboratory experiment to test the main predictions of the theory. In contrast to existing work that suggests social polarization may have a positive impact by increasing participation, we show that social polarization causes political representatives to take policy decisions that diverge from the social optimum, and voters to select candidates with lower average quality.
Subjects: 
social identity
political selection
political polarization
JEL: 
C92
D72
Published Version’s DOI: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Accepted Manuscript (Postprint)

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