Electoral Competition with Asymmetrically Informed Voters

Joint with: Faruk Gul

We explore the implications of voter ignorance on policy selection and policy outcomes in a simple model of party competition. For a simple benchmark case, we show that voter ignorance has no effect on the election outcome if the electorate is large. We then examine a model where voters are uncertain about the distribution of voter preferences and about the policy choice of one of the candidates. We characterize the limit equilibria of that

model and show that voter ignorance leads to more partisan outcomes. In particular, we show that the Downsian prediction of median preferred outcomes is not robust even if candidates have weak policy preferences and mostly care about winning the election.

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