Electoral Poaching and Party Identification

This paper studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of party strength based on the sizes and intensities of a party s loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties strengths. In equilibrium, parties target or poach a strict subset of the opposition party s loyal voters: offering those voters a high expected transfer, while freezing out the remainder with a zero transfer. The size of the subset of opposition voters frozen out and consequently, the level of inequality in utilities generated by a party s equilibrium redistribution schedule is increasing in the opposition party s strength. We also construct a measure of political polarization that is increasing in the sum and symmetry of the parties strengths, and find that the expected ex-post inequality in utilities of the implemented policy is increasing in the political polarization.