Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/94126 
Year of Publication: 
2013
Series/Report no.: 
SFB/TR 15 Discussion Paper No. 442
Publisher: 
Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio 15 - Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems (GESY), München
Abstract: 
We analyze how political candidates can signal their competence and show that polarization might be a way of doing this. For this purpose, we study a unidimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition in which a fraction of candidates have the ability to correctly observe a policy-relevant state of the world. We show that candidates tend to polarize, even in the absence of policy bias. This is because proposing an extreme platform has a competence signaling effect and has a strictly higher probability of winning than proposing a median platform. The degree of polarization depends on how uncertain is the state of the world.
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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