کیفیت کاندیدا ، فشار تایید گروه و ماهیت تبلیغات سیاسی

Candidates may vary in quality, where quality is some characteristic orthogonal to policy. This “simple modification” has for the most part defied integration into the Downsian framework. Here we add the following complicating factors. We consider the possibility that there are uninformed voters who are ignorant of the candidates' relative quality. However, a pressure group with inside information regarding the quality of the candidates may endorse one of the candidates as the high-quality candidate. We assume that the uninformed voters behave rationally in the presence of this endorsement. We demonstrate that truth telling by the pressure group is an equilibrium outcome. We also show that campaign endorsements by the pressure group are generally welfare improving even though the pressure group takes advantage of its private information.

Political advertising presents the following conundrum: if voters are informed, then there is no need for advertising; and if voters are uninformed, then advertising may be dishonest and the voters would not be able to tell. So, why would voters pay any attention to political advertising? To add substance to the puzzle, suppose that a pressure group has inside information on a candidate's integrity or some other characteristic that is valued by the voters, independent of the policy position taken by the candidate.1 The pressure group might agree to publicly endorse one of the candidates as the high-quality candidate even though this was not the case if the candidate's policy position were sufficiently close to the pressure group's preferred position to make up for the lower quality. So, again we are led to ask why would the voters pay attention to such endorsements.2 This paper provides the following answer. Competition between the candidates results in a set of choices, such that the pressure group will always want to tell the truth about the relative quality of the candidates. This paper also provides a different perspective on the role of pressure groups in the democratic process. In general, the role of pressure groups is viewed as negative. Here, we show that pressure group endorsements are likely to improve the welfare of the median voter, and, under plausible assumptions, pressure group endorsements improve the welfare of all voters.

In this paper, I have embedded quality, pressure group endorsements, and uninformed voters into the standard Downsian framework. Quality differentials cause divergence in the candidate positions. The greater the quality differential (equivalently, the more voters weight quality), the greater the divergence and the higher proportion of votes for the high-quality candidate. In principle, these results should be testable with the appropriate data. Initially, I considered the case where a pressure group has extreme power: the pressure group has inside information on the quality of the candidates; there are no other pressure groups to compete away any rents, neither candidate is able to credibly transmit information on its quality to the uninformed voters, and the pressure group endorsement cannot be independently verified. The pressure group takes advantage of this power to improve its own welfare. Nevertheless, when the distribution of voters is symmetric, the by-product is improved welfare for a majority of voters. When voters have linear-symmetric loss functions, pressure group endorsements are weakly welfare improving for all voters. The competition between the candidates for an endorsement by the pressure group results in the high-quality candidate moving away from the median voter toward the position of the pressure group. But the degree of distortion away from the median voter is compensated by the improvement in candidate quality. Later, I considered the case where there are two or more pressure groups with opposing interests. If the financial costs of endorsement are low, there will be no distortion whatsoever—the high-quality candidate will be endorsed at the median voter's most preferred position. So all voters will be strictly better off (in comparison to a situation without pressure groups), whatever the shape of the voters' loss functions or the distribution of voters. As the cost of informing voters increases, the high-quality candidate moves away from the median towards a pressure group's most preferred position in order to compensate the pressure group for the cost of the endorsement.