IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/stpocp/978-3-319-15551-7_11.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

No Polarization in Spite of Primaries: A Median Voter Theorem with Competitive Nominations

In: The Political Economy of Governance

Author

Listed:
  • Gilles Serra

    (Center for Economics Research and Teaching (CIDE))

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that primaries induce candidates to adopt extremist positions. However the empirical evidence is mixed, so a theoretical investigation is warranted. This chapter develops a general model introducing the fundamental elements of primary elections in the well-known spatial voting model by Downs (An economic theory of democracy. Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York, 1957). In spite of significant incentives for candidates to diverge, I find the surprising result that they will all converge to the median voter’s ideal point. The result in this paper suggests that primaries are not sufficient to create polarization by themselves. Rather, for candidates to diverge from the center, other complementary features must be present. An implication is that previous formal results in the literature predicting that primaries lead to polarization probably contain other factors that must be interacting with primaries. Future research should endeavor to disentangle these factors.

Suggested Citation

  • Gilles Serra, 2015. "No Polarization in Spite of Primaries: A Median Voter Theorem with Competitive Nominations," Studies in Political Economy, in: Norman Schofield & Gonzalo Caballero (ed.), The Political Economy of Governance, edition 127, pages 211-229, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:stpocp:978-3-319-15551-7_11
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-15551-7_11
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cintolesi, Andrea, 2022. "Political polarization and primary elections," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 200(C), pages 596-617.
    2. Bernard Grofman & Orestis Troumpounis & Dimitrios Xefteris, 2016. "Electoral competition with primaries and quality asymmetries," Working Papers 135286117, Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department.
    3. Andreottola, Giovanni, 2021. "Signaling valence in primary elections," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 1-32.
    4. Giovanni Andreottola, 2020. "Signaling Valence in Primary Elections," CSEF Working Papers 559, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:stpocp:978-3-319-15551-7_11. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.