Rational erraticism
| Author | Frank Bohn,Xue Wang |
| DOI | 10.1177/09516298221081807 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Rational erraticism
Frank Bohn
Department of Economics, Institute for Management Research, Radboud
University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, 6525 AJ Nijmegen
KOF Swiss Economic Institute, Zurich, Switzerland
Xue Wang
School of Economics, Southwestern University of Finance and
Economics, Chengdu, China
Abstract
Trump and Bolsonaro are perceived as erratic presidents, but they may actually be quite rational.
We explore two channels of manipulation in a polarized society. One relates to swing voters and
their perception of a president’s competence. The other one captures the effort by a president to
appeal and mobilize her base voters. We model erraticism in dealing with the COVID-19 pan-
demic, but our model could also be applied to other realms of political manipulation. We find
that erratic freedom propaganda directed against state-administered lockdowns may help a presi-
dent in her re-election bid. Paradoxically, if the challenger gains popular support or increases voter
mobilization against the president, it is optimal for the president to further increase erratic propa-
ganda in order to increase the mobilization of her own supporters. Our predicted surge in voter
mobilization is actually a main outcome of the 2020 US elections.
“The more desperate @realdonaldtrump gets the more erratic he’ll act.”
–Joe Lockhart, former White House Press Secretary,
April 25, 2020, on Twitter.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries around the world and most states
in the US introduced lockdowns (or at least social distancing measures) in March 2020. In
the US, the situation was peculiar in at least two respects. First, attitudes towards
COVID-19 (and the lockdown) are strongly influenced by partisan voting patterns
Corresponding author:
Xue Wang, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu, China.
Email: xuewang@swufe.edu.cn
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2022, Vol. 34(2) 219–235
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/ 09516298221081807
journals.sagepub.com/home/jtp
(Vince, 2020). On 23 May, for instance, 53% of the Democrats were extremely concerned
and 33% moderately concerned, but only 8% and 20%, respectively, of the
Republicans.
1,2
Second, lockdown measures were instituted by state governors, but the
president pushed for early easing. Donald Trump’s public statements were seen as
erratic and unbecoming of an American president. He supported and even stirred up
fierce protests against the restrictions. “In mid-April, he called to ‘LIBERATE’
Michigan, Virginia and Minnesota. And he called the armed protesters who stormed
the Michigan State Capitol on April 30 ‘very good people’who ‘want their lives back
again, safely’” (Shepherd, 2020).
This paper argues that an incumbent may use erraticism for political reasons. As an
example, we study seemingly erratic liberation rhetoric by American President Donald
Trump during the 2020 election year. It has been argued that Trump’s erratic freedom
propaganda (as it will be called in this paper) against the lockdown measures may be a
campaign tool despite popular support for the lockdown.
3
This paper takes this argument
a step further. We claim that Trump’s seemingly erratic instances of freedom propaganda
may actually be a rational attempt not only to appeal to his hardcore followers, but also to
swing voters. What’s more, we find that fiercer lockdown policies may have actually been
beneficial for Trump. Furthermore, our model (which was built before the 2020 elections)
predicts that growing support for the Democrats or rising Democratic voter mobilization
can, at least partically, be undone by increasing the number of seemingly erratic instances
of propaganda by Trump.
4
Our predicted surge in voter mobilization is actually a main
outcome of the 2020 US elections.
Our paper is –to our knowledge –the first theoretical model that studies the effect of
political manipulation on the 2020 US elections or, more generally, of erraticism on pol-
itical outcomes.
5
We show that an incumbent’s winning chances can be improved by
making use of two channels, a perceived competence channel (affecting swing voters)
and a voter mobilization channel (affecting hardcore followers as well as staunch oppos-
ition voters). The former is similar to the mechanisms captured in Political Business or
Budget Cycle models as in Lohmann (1998) and Shi and Svensson (2006), respectively.
The idea there is that voters (and politicians) do not know how competent politicians are,
but the incumbent can exert a hidden effort which allows her to appear more competent
and, thereby, increase her re-election chances.
6,7
The latter captures the effect of appeal-
ing (seemingly erratic) rhetoric on hardcore supporters while acknowledging that this
may also have an adverse mobilization effect on staunch opposition voters. Combining
both channels ensures that an erratic politician may be in a strong position to secure
his or her reelection in free elections.
Obviously, erraticism can only be relevant under two conditions. First, the electorate is
susceptible to it. In our model, this is given by the two aforementioned channels. Second,
erratic propaganda must actually be available as an instrument, i.e. the incumbent must be
willing to use it. How much erratic propaganda is then used depends on the effect it has
through both aforementioned channels, but also on how much the incumbent benefits
from winning the elections which is reflected by the incumbent’s ego rent. One could
argue that the ego rent is particularly high for populists which would explain why popu-
lists might rationally resort to erraticism more than other politicians. This may explain
220 Journal of Theoretical Politics 34(2)
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