Work

The revelation incentive for issue engagement in campaigns

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Empirical studies have found that although parties focus disproportionately on favorable issues, they also address the same issues—especially, salient issues—through much of the ‘short campaign’. We present a model of multiparty competition with endogenous issue salience where parties behave in line with these patterns in equilibrium. In our model, parties’ issue emphases have two effects: influencing voter priorities, and informing voters about their issue positions. Thus, parties trade off two incentives when choosing issues to emphasize: increasing the importance of favorable issues (‘the salience incentive’), and revealing positions on salient issues to sympathetic voters (‘the revelation incentive’). The relative strength of these two incentives determines how far elections constrain parties to respond to voters’ initial issue priorities.

Source: Journal of Theoretical Politics

DOI: 10.1177/09516298251334331

Authors: Chitralekha Basu, Matthew Knowles

Institutions: University of Cologne, City St George's, University of London

Language: English

Topic: Electoral Systems and Political Participation

Subfield: Political Science and International Relations

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,650