Ideology signaling in electoral politics
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629816630429 |
| Date | 01 January 2017 |
| Published date | 01 January 2017 |
| Author | Hisashi Sawaki |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2017, Vol.29(1) 48–68
ÓThe Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0951629816630429
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Ideology signaling in electoral
politics
Hisashi Sawaki
Department of Economics, OkayamaUniversity, Japan
Abstract
This paper considers an electoral model in which an incumbent and a challenger have ideological
policy preferences that are private information. The incumbent may bias pre-electoral policies to
signal preferences to the electorate with the aim of affecting the outcome of the election. When
the two candidates are of completelydifferent types, such a policy bias can occur only in a moder-
ate direction. However, when their possible types overlap, a policy bias can be created in either a
moderate or an extreme direction.
Keywords
Election; ideology; private information; signaling
1. Introduction
Although there are many cases in the political arena where politicians take moder-
ate action to pander to median voters, there are also cases where they take action
that may seem extreme, even to the eye of the vast majority of voters. On occasion,
such extreme policies may ultimately enhance the popularity of the politician.
Furthermore, there are cases where such phenomena emerge from a politically
‘murky’ situation in which the ideologies of ruling and opposition parties are not
clearly divided.
For instance, after becoming prime minister in 2001, Junichiro Koizumi set out
to enact market-oriented reforms in Japan. Although many Japanese, who had
been fatigued by long-term economic stagnation, formed some degree of consensus
Corresponding author:
Hisashi Sawaki, Departmentof Economics, Okayama University,3-1-1 Tsushima-Naka, Kita-Ku, Okayama
700-8530, Japan.
Email: sawaki-h@cc.okayama-u.ac.jp
around the need for decisive action to bolster the economy, a number of people
were stunned by Prime Minister Koizumi’s reforms, which were accompanied by a
slogan of ‘reform with no sacred cows’ and were radical by Japan’s standards (The
Economist, 2006).
Astonishment reached its peak when he dissolved the House of Representatives
after his bill to privatize Japan’s vast state-run postal service was rejected in the
Upper House in 2005. Mr Koizumi called the general election, which essentially
became a referendum on this privatization issue. People’s initial surprise turned to
support for his administration, which manifested itself in the form of an electoral
victory, and Mr Koizumi was re-elected prime minister.
An intriguing point is that the prime minister proceeded with the radical reforms
even though he had not received monolithic support from the ruling parties, at
least in his early days in office. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), to which
Mr Koizumi belonged, had a considerable number of politicians who shared anti-
market views with the bureaucrats at the main ministries (Mulgan, 2002: 55;
Este
´vez-Abe, 2006). These conditions may have prompted him to make his declara-
tion when taking office in 2001: ‘My reform plans would be tantamount to the
destruction of the LDP (Mulgan, 2002: 49).’
Coincidentally, it seems that Mr Koizumi shared some of the political views of
the opposition parties. There was a certain amount of policy commonality between
him and some members of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ),
though they were not identical. Even though the LDP had traditionally been closer
to business interests and the DPJ was closer to labor interests, the two major par-
ties both contained a spectrum of views on the central issue of market-liberal
reforms (Mulgan, 2002: 62). Out of such a muddled political environment emerged
Mr Koizumi’s radical reform programs.
The purpose of this paper is to present a theoreticalhypothesis that helps explain
such extremism and sheds light on the relationship between interparty ideological
differentiation and intraparty policy polarization. A fundamental question is this:
Are pre-electoral policies more likely to become polarized when the ruling and
opposition parties have distinct ideologies or when they share a degree of common-
ality? To address this question, this paper considers an electoral model in which an
incumbent and a challenger compete against each other when their ideological pre-
ferences are private information. The focus is on pre-electoral policymaking by the
incumbent that may be biased to signal preferences to voters. Behind this modeling
selection is the author’s conjecture that Mr Koizumi might have been signaling his
political philosophy to the electorate. Nonetheless, the model is completely abstract
and does not deal with any concrete episodes.
The model makes a simple but novel assumption regarding the candidates’ ideo-
logical preferences. It allows the possible preferences of candidates from different
parties to overlap. That is, it assumes that a candidate from a rightist party may
have an ideal point that comes to the left of the most right-ideal point of a leftist
party candidate. Under this assumption, it is shown that a policy bias can be cre-
ated in either a moderate or an extreme direction, depending on conditions. By
Sawaki 49
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