IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_3752.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Elites or Masses? A Structural Model of Policy Divergence, Voter Sorting and Apparent Polarization in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1972-2008

Author

Listed:
  • Stefan Krasa
  • Mattias Polborn

Abstract

One of the most widely discussed phenomena in American politics today is the perceived increasing partisan divide that splits the U.S. electorate. A central contested question is whether this diagnosis is actually true, and if so, what is the underlying cause. We develop a model that relates the parties’ positions on economic and “cultural” issues, the voters’ ideal positions and the electorate’s voting behavior, and apply the model to U.S. presidential elections between 1972 and 2008. The model allows us to recover candidates’ positions from voter behavior; to decompose changes in the overall political polarization of the electorate into changes in the distribution of voter ideal positions and consequences of elite polarization; and to determine the characteristics of voters who changed their party allegiance.

Suggested Citation

  • Stefan Krasa & Mattias Polborn, 2012. "Elites or Masses? A Structural Model of Policy Divergence, Voter Sorting and Apparent Polarization in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1972-2008," CESifo Working Paper Series 3752, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3752
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3752.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Krasa, Stefan & Polborn, Mattias K., 2012. "Political competition between differentiated candidates," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 76(1), pages 249-271.
    2. Gelman, Andrew & Shor, Boris & Bafumi, Joseph & Park, David, 2008. "Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What's the Matter with Connecticut?," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 2(4), pages 345-367, January.
    3. Stefan Krasa & Mattias Polborn, 2014. "Social Ideology and Taxes in a Differentiated Candidates Framework," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(1), pages 308-322, January.
    4. Groseclose, Tim & Levitt, Steven D. & Snyder, James M., 1999. "Comparing Interest Group Scores across Time and Chambers: Adjusted ADA Scores for the U.S. Congress," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 93(1), pages 33-50, March.
    5. Krasa, Stefan & Polborn, Mattias, 2010. "Competition between Specialized Candidates," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 104(4), pages 745-765, November.
    6. Hetherington, Marc J., 2001. "Resurgent Mass Partisanship: The Role of Elite Polarization," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 95(3), pages 619-631, September.
    7. Stephen Ansolabehere & Jonathan Rodden & James M. Snyder Jr., 2006. "Purple America," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 20(2), pages 97-118, Spring.
    8. Laurel Harbridge & Neil Malhotra, 2011. "Electoral Incentives and Partisan Conflict in Congress: Evidence from Survey Experiments," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 55(3), pages 494-510, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stefan Krasa & Mattias Polborn, 2014. "Policy Divergence and Voter Polarization in a Structural Model of Elections," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 57(1), pages 31-76.
    2. Stefan Krasa & Mattias Polborn, 2014. "Social Ideology and Taxes in a Differentiated Candidates Framework," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(1), pages 308-322, January.
    3. Minh T. Le & Alejandro Saporiti & Yizhi Wang, 2021. "Distributive politics with other‐regarding preferences," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 23(2), pages 203-227, April.
    4. Karakas, Leyla D. & Mitra, Devashish, 2020. "Inequality, redistribution and the rise of outsider candidates," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 1-16.
    5. Karakas, Leyla D. & Mitra, Devashish, 2020. "Believers vs. deniers: Climate change and environmental policy polarization," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 65(C).
    6. Hans Gersbach & Philippe Muller & Oriol Tejada, 2015. "Costs of Change, Political Polarization, and Re-election Hurdles," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 15/222, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    7. Gersbach, Hans & Tejada, Oriol & Muller, Philippe, 2016. "The Effects of Higher Re-election Hurdles and Costs of Policy Change on Political Polarization," CEPR Discussion Papers 11375, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    8. Fabian Gouret & Stéphane Rossignol, 2019. "Intensity valence," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 53(1), pages 63-112, June.
    9. Denter, Philipp, 2021. "Valence, complementarities, and political polarization," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 128(C), pages 39-57.
    10. Xefteris, Dimitrios, 2017. "Multidimensional electoral competition between differentiated candidates," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 112-121.
    11. Konstantinos Matakos & Dimitrios Xefteris, 2017. "Divide and rule: redistribution in a model with differentiated candidates," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 63(4), pages 867-902, April.
    12. Andrei M. Gomberg & Francisco Marhuenda & Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, 2016. "Endogenous party platforms: ‘stochastic’ membership," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 62(4), pages 839-866, October.
    13. Thomas Jensen, 2015. "Elections, Information, and State-Dependent Candidate Quality," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 17(5), pages 702-723, October.
    14. Hollibaugh, Gary E. & Klingler, Jonathan & Ramey, Adam, 2014. "More than a Feeling: Personality and Congressional Behavior," IAST Working Papers 14-09, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).
    15. Marco Magnani, 2017. "Electoral competition with ideologically biased voters," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 29(3), pages 415-439, July.
    16. Stylianos Papageorgiou & Dimitrios Xefteris, 2021. "A Collective Investment in Financial Literacy by Heterogeneous Households," University of Cyprus Working Papers in Economics 04-2021, University of Cyprus Department of Economics.
    17. Anja Prummer, 2016. "Spatial Advertisement in Political Campaigns," Working Papers 805, Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance.
    18. Aytimur, Emre & Boukouras, Aris & Suen, Richard M. H., 2024. "How Does Political Uncertainty Affect the Optimal Degree of Policy Divergence?," MPRA Paper 122279, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Alexander Shapoval & Shlomo Weber & Alexei Zakharov, 2019. "Valence influence in electoral competition with rank objectives," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 48(3), pages 713-753, September.
    20. Razvan Vlaicu, 2018. "Inequality, participation, and polarization," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 50(4), pages 597-624, April.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    polarization; differentiated candidates; policy divergence; ideology; voter migration;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:ces:ceswps:_3752. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesifde.html .

    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.