Abstract
Theories from psychology suggest that voters' perceptions of political positions depend on their non-policy related attitudes towards the candidates. A voter who likes (dislikes) a candidate will perceive the candidate's position as closer to (further from) his own than it really is. This is called projection. If voters' perceptions are not counterfactual and voting is based on perceived policy positions then projection gives a generally liked candidate an incentive to be ambiguous. In this paper we construct and analyze a formal model to investigate under which conditions this incentive survives in the strategic setting of electoral competition, even if voters dislike ambiguity per se
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen |
| Number of pages | 32 |
| Publication status | Published - 2007 |
Keywords
- Faculty of Social Sciences
- electoral competition
- ambiguity
- voter perception
- cognitive consistency
- projection