Collaborative Research: An Informational Rationale for Political Parties

合作研究：政党的信息依据

• 批准号: 0243412
• 负责人: Michael Ting
• 金额: $ 1.77万
• 依托单位: Columbia University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2002
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2002-07-01 至 2003-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0243412&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？为什么政党要对其成员施加纪律呢？本研究将这些问题从理论上和经验上联系起来，将政党建模为选民的信息品牌。正如传统智慧所暗示的那样，大多数政党的标签都带有相当精确的含义。民主党人通常是自由派，共和党人通常是保守派，而自由意志主义者基本上是保守派，但通常是社会自由派。理论上的问题是，这种均衡现象是如何维持的？在基本模型中，研究人员假设存在大量选区，选民厌恶风险，不完全了解候选人的理想政策，候选人无法承诺宣布的政策平台。在这种环境下，政党可以通过聚集意识形态相似的候选人来发挥关键作用。重要的是，党性是内生的。因此，某些类型的候选人有动机与某个政党结盟，以减少选民对其偏好的不确定性。调查人员的试验结果如下。(1)政党可以成为候选人偏好的有效筛选工具。从直觉上看，这种筛选之所以有效，是因为政党成员资格对候选人的意识形态类型施加了差异成本，因此只有那些偏好与政党纲领足够接近的候选人才愿意加入。即使在一党制下，与无党派候选人相比，政党候选人能够传达的信息增加了选民的福利。(2)在两党制中，筛选的有效性与平台选择之间存在直接联系。当加入政党的成本很高时，例如：在美国，政党可以有效地约束其成员或筛选出特定类型的候选人——政党标签非常有用，政党的平台也以唐氏风格融合在一起。然而，当政党标签信息量不足时，平台就会出现分歧。这是因为采取极端立场减少了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。候选人并不总是与最近的政党结盟，因为他们也考虑到党员资格的选举利益。这些好处可能因选民的偏好而异。因此，即使是具有相同理想政策的候选人也可能加入不同的政党，这取决于他们所在地区中间选民的偏好。基本模型的扩展提供了额外的预测。特别令人感兴趣的是，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。这种扩展可以解释党的标签有时在不同的地方意味着不同的事情。另一个延伸是将政党塑造为民主机构，必须集体选择平台和筛选机制，或许可以通过初选制度。其他包括内生政党数量，探索替代选举制度，以及确定最佳的筛选或纪律水平。初步结果和建议的扩展都可以进行实证分析。我们将探讨的主题包括政党品牌的有效性，政党筛选与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。