What is it about?
This paper provides a possible explanation why an incumbent politician may take extreme actions before elections. He may do it to signal his true ideology to the voters. Intriguingly, this phenomenon can occur only when the ideologies of the ruling and opposition parties are overlapping, rather than they are distinct.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
A fundamental question is this: Are pre-electoral policies more likely to become polarized when ruling and opposition parties have distinct ideologies or when they share a degree of commonality? One implication of this paper is that the extremist tendency within any one party may become most active when party ideologies are overlapping.
Perspectives
When Prime Minister Koizumi set out to enact market-oriented reforms in Japan in 2001, there were "the forces of resistence" in the ruling party he belonged to. Moreover, some opposition parties seemed to have politicians who shared market-liberal views with Koizumi. This paper provides a possible explanation for why extreme policies can emerge from such a politically 'muddled' situation, using a game-theoretic model.
Dr Hisashi Sawaki
Tsuda University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ideology signaling in electoral politics, Journal of Theoretical Politics, June 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0951629816630429.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
