(Not) Addressing issues in electoral campaigns
| Published date | 01 October 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09516298231202424 |
| Author | Salvador Barberà,Anke Gerber |
| Date | 01 October 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
(Not) Addressing issues
in electoral campaigns
Salvador Barberà
Facultat d’Economia i Empresa, MOVE, Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona and Barcelona GSE, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain
Anke Gerber
Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, Department of
Economics, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Abstract
Two candidates competing for election may raise some issues for debate during the electoral cam-
paign, while avoiding others. Wepresent a model in which the decision to introduce an issue, or to
reply to the opponent’s position on one that she raised, may change the further list of topics that
end up being discussed. Candidates’strategic decisions are driven by their appraisal of their
expected vote share at the end of the campaign. Real phenomena observed during campaigns,
like the convergence of the parties to address the same issues, or else their diverging choice
on which ones to treat, or the relevance of issue ownership can be explained within our stark
basic model. Most importantly, our analysis is based on a novel concept of equilibrium that avoids
the (often arbitrary) use of predetermined protocols. This allows us to endogenously predict not
only the list of topics that will be touched upon by each candidate, but also the order in which they
will be addressed.
Keywords
Electoral campaigns; equilibrium sets of continuation campaigns; issues; issue convergence; issue
divergence; issue ownership
JEL Classification: D72
Corresponding author:
Anke Gerber, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, Department of Economics, Universität
Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 5, D-20146 Hamburg, Germany. anke.gerber@uni-hamburg.de.
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2023, Vol. 35(4) 259–291
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09516298231202424
journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp
1. Introduction
Contenders in an electoral campaign may decide to be first in raising some issues for con-
troversy, never to address others, or do it only in response to their opponents’initiative.
These possibilities are not only theoretical: the campaigning strategies of candidates
result in a large variety of campaign configurations, some of which have been typified
by the empirical literature on the subject. Sometimes an issue is not addressed by any con-
tender. Sometimes each one of them addresses issues that the other skips: this case is
called issue divergence. In the opposite side, when both candidates enter open discussion
of the same topics, we talk of issue convergence. Of course, a host of combinations may
arise between these two polar cases.
The strategic reasons why candidates make such choices include many factors. In
some cases, taking the lead in raising a subject can be advantageous, while in others a
wait-and-see attitude may be better. The candidates from a certain party may be perceived
by voters as having an advantage on some subject over those in a different party, maybe
for historical or ideological reasons: we then can speak about issue ownership. Its actual
role can be tested for, and it can vary substantially over time.
A vast literature on electoral campaigns has distinguished among the sort of decisions
we just described and has analyzed the underlying reasons for agents to adopt different
strategies when deciding what issues to address, when to do it and with what intensity.
The empirical literature documents evidence for both issue convergence and divergence
(see e.g. Petrocik, 1996; Spiliotes and Vavreck, 2003; Sigelman and Buell, 2004;
Green-Pedersen, 2007).
Our article has two quite different purposes than those of preceding works, both rather
methodological. Our first purpose is to generate a large variety of different potential cam-
paigns with a minimum amount of apparatus. For this purpose, we propose a stark model
of campaign formation, where two candidates can independently determine on what
issues to remain silent, which ones to address and in which order, based on their expected
vote share in the election. Addressing an issue can be given two interpretations. One is
that by addressing an issue a candidate announces her policy on that issue while
staying silent on an issue means that the status quo policy on that issue will prevail in
case the candidate is elected. Voters are then assumed to base their vote on the belief
that candidates will keep their promises once elected. The other interpretation is that
addressing an issue makes the candidate’s position on that issue salient in the eyes of
the voters. Here voters are assumed to base their vote on the salient positions of the can-
didates while they believe that the candidates will stick to the status quo policy for the
issues they have not addressed during the campaign. Admittedly, our model omits vari-
ables whose role has been analyzed by the literature on electoral campaigns, and even
those that we explicitly consider are treated in a simplified matter. Our objective is not
to deny the relevance of additional considerations or complications, but to point at the
fact that these are not strictly needed to generate the basic phenomena we want to
highlight.
In fact much of the theoretical analysis on agenda formation highlights the role of cam-
paign funding and its strategic use, proposing models where candidates or parties can
affect the preferences of voters by modifying the salience of issues through the allocation
260 Journal of Theoretical Politics 35(4)
of funds (see, e.g. Amorós and Puy, 2013; Aragonès et al., 2015; Dragu and Fan, 2016;
Ash et al., 2017; Osório, 2018; Denter, 2020; Balart et al., 2022; Yamaguchi, 2022). Issue
convergence or divergence can indeed result from such considerations but, as we will
show, they also obtain if candidates do not face any budget constraints. Demange and
Van der Straeten (2020) study candidates’information revelation in an electoral cam-
paign where voters are imperfectly informed about candidates’platforms in a multidi-
mensional policy space. Yet, different from our model they restrict to the case where
voters’utility is separable across issues. Moreover, it turns out that in their model
there is no real strategic interaction between the candidates because the optimal strategy
for each candidate is independent of the strategies of other candidates.
Our second purpose in this article is to show that it is possible to endogenously deter-
mine the timing in which candidates will adopt their equilibrium decisions, sometimes
taking the lead and addressing a new issue, sometimes waiting for their opponent to
raise a new one and then responding or not. There are only few papers that study a
dynamic model of an electoral campaign as we do. Among the notable exceptions is
Kamada and Sugaya (2020) who study a game where candidates choose the time
when to announce their policies. In their model, there is an exogenous Poisson process
that determines the opportunities for policy announcement while in our model the
timing of policy announcements is fully endogenous. Chen and Eraslan (2017) also con-
sider a dynamic model of policy announcements by two parties who take turn in govern-
ment. Again the timing of policy announcements is not fully endogenous because only
the incumbent party has agenda-setting power.
In our article, we use a variant of a solution concept proposed by Dutta et al. (2004)
that allows to endogenize the order in which candidates will eventually address the dif-
ferent issues. This enables us to incorporate, as part of our results, the dynamics according
to which the candidates ponder the tradeoffs between benefiting from a short term advan-
tage to be proactive or to wait on a given issue, versus the risks of inducing the opponent
to raise others on which the advantage is in the other side. The use of this flexible solution
concept contrasts with the rigidity of extensive form games, that impose a predetermined
order of play which need not coincide with our rationality-based equilibrium prediction.
The article stresses the applicability of our model to highlight different aspects of full
campaigns, but it can also be re-interpreted as a model of political debates. In that context,
it is interesting to note that a commonly used strategy that is often recommended to con-
tenders is to ignore the questions posed by their adversaries or by the moderator and to
insist on the same topics again and again. Yet, under proper interpretation of this attitude,
we believe that our model is also useful to analyze this case, among others.
Notice that the solution concept has already been applied by Barberà and Gerber
(2022) to study a related but quite different problem involving issues for debate. In
that article, members of a parliament could propose issues for debate and then vote on
a position for these issues to become part of a legal text. Here the issues are proposed
for different purposes, and those who select which ones to use in a campaign (the candi-
dates) are not the same as those who decide the payoff relevant outcomes (the voters in
the election).
The article proceeds as follows. In Section 2, we present our model and the equilib-
rium notion. Section 3 discusses the special cases and a variant of our basic model
Barberà and Gerber 261
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