Collaborative Research: An Informational Rationale for Political Parties

合作研究：政党的信息依据

• 批准号: 0079035
• 负责人: Michael Ting
• 金额: $ 9.96万
• 依托单位: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2000
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2000-08-15 至 2002-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0079035&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Informational; Rationale; Political

What role do parties play in electoral competition? Why would parties exert discipline on theirmembers? This investigation links these issues theoretically and empirically by modeling parties asinformative brands to voters.As conventional wisdom suggests, most party labels carry fairly precise meanings. Democratsare generally liberal, Republicans are generally conservative, and Libertarians are basically conserva-tive but often socially liberal. The theoretical question is, how is this sustained as an equilibriumphenomenon? In the basic model, the researchers assume there are a large number of constituencies, voters are risk averse and incompletely informed about candidate ideal policies, and candidates are unable tocommit to a declared policy platform. In this environment, parties can play a critical role by ag-gregating ideologically similar candidates. Importantly, party membership is endogenous. Certaintypes of candidates thereby have an incentive to affiliate themselves with a party to reduce voteruncertainty about their preferences.The results of a pilot by the investigators are the following. (1) Parties can be effective screening devices for candidate preferences. Intuitively, this screening works because party membership imposes differentialcosts across candidate ideological types, so that only candidates whose preferences are sufficientlyclose to a party 's platform are willing to affiliate. Even in a single party system, voter welfareis increased by the information party candidates are able to convey relative to unaffiliated candi-dates. (2) In a two party system there is a direct link between the effectiveness of screening andplatform choices. When the costs of joining parties is high-e.g., parties can effectively disciplinetheir members or screen out certain type of candidates -party labels are very informative, and theparties' platforms converge in Downsian fashion. When party labels are less informative, however,the platforms diverge.This happens because taking an extreme position reduces a party's ideolog-ical heterogeneity, thus making its label more meaningful to voters. (3) Candidates do not alwaysaffiliate with the nearest party, since they also take the electoral benefits of party membership intoaccount. These benefits may vary depending on constituency preferences. Thus even candidateswith the same ideal policy may affiliate with different parties, depending on the preferences of theirdistrict's median voter.Extensions of the basic model provide additional predictions. Of particular interest is thepossibility of hot races in which voters learn much more about candidates than we assume in ourbasic model. This extension can account for the fact that party labels sometimes mean differentthings in different places. Another extension is to model parties as democratic institutions that mustchoose platforms and screening mechanisms collectively, perhaps through a primary system. Othersinclude endogenizing the number of parties, exploring alternate electoral systems, and determiningthe optimal level of screening or discipline.Both the initial results and the proposed extensions are amenable to empirical analysis. Amongthe topics we will pursue are the effectiveness of party branding, the relationship between partyscreening and platform choices, retirement and defection patterns, and the evolution of platformsover time.

政党在选举竞争中扮演什么角色？为什么政党要对他们的成员施加纪律？这项调查通过将政党建模为选民的信息性品牌，从理论和经验上将这些问题联系在一起。正如传统智慧所表明的那样，大多数政党标签具有相当精确的含义。民主党人总体上是自由派，共和党人总体上是保守的，自由主义者基本上是保守的，但在社会上往往是自由的。理论问题是，这种均衡现象是如何持续的？在基本模型中，研究人员假设有大量的选民，选民厌恶风险，对候选人理想政策的了解不完全，候选人无法承诺已宣布的政策纲领。在这种环境下，政党可以通过聚集意识形态上相似的候选人来发挥关键作用。重要的是，党员身份是内生的。因此，某些类型的候选人有动机加入一个政党，以减少选民对他们偏好的不确定性。调查人员进行的试点结果如下。(1)政党可以成为候选人偏好的有效筛选工具。直观地说，这种筛选之所以有效，是因为政党成员身份对不同的候选人意识形态类型施加了不同的成本，因此只有偏好与某个政党的S纲领足够接近的候选人才愿意加入。即使在一党制中，选民福利也会因政党候选人相对于独立候选人能够传达的信息而增加。(2)在两党制中，筛选的有效性与政纲选择之间存在直接联系。当加入政党的成本很高时--例如，政党可以有效地约束其成员或筛选出特定类型的候选人--政党标签非常有信息量，两党的纲领以唐斯式的方式收敛。然而，当政党的标签信息较少时，政纲就会发生分歧。这是因为采取极端立场会减少一个政党的意识形态异质性，从而使其标签对选民更有意义。(3)候选人并不总是与最近的政党打成一片，因为他们也考虑到了政党成员的选举利益。这些福利可能会因选民的偏好而有所不同。因此，即使拥有相同理想政策的候选人也可能加入不同的政党，这取决于他们选区中值选民的偏好。基本模型的扩展提供了额外的预测。尤其令人感兴趣的是，在激烈的竞选中，选民对候选人的了解比我们在基本模型中假设的要多得多。这一扩展可以解释这样一个事实，即政党标签有时在不同的地方意味着不同的东西。另一个延伸是将政党模型化为民主机构，这些机构必须集体选择平台和筛选机制，或许是通过初级系统。其他措施包括使政党数量内生化，探索替代选举制度，以及确定筛选或纪律的最佳水平。初步结果和拟议的延期都可以进行实证分析。我们将探讨的话题包括政党品牌的有效性，政党筛选和平台选择之间的关系，退休和叛逃模式，以及平台随时间的演变。