The Effects of Higher Re-election Hurdles and Costs of Policy Change on Political Polarization

Hans Gersbach, Oriol Tejada and Philippe Muller

No 11375, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We develop and study a two-period model of political competition where (i) changes of policies impose costs on all individuals, and (ii) such costs increase linearly with the magnitude of the policy change. The contribution is two-fold. First, we show that intermediate marginal costs yield the lowest levels of policy polarization, welfare being a single-peaked function of the marginal cost. Second, we apply our model to the design of optimal re-election hurdles. We show that whatever the marginal cost of change, raising the vote-share needed for re-election above a half reduces policy polarization and increases welfare. We further prove the existence of a unique re-election hurdle that simultaneously maximizes welfare and minimizes policy polarization. The robustness of our results is studied for several extensions of the baseline model, notably for convex costs of change.

Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ger and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11375 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11375

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11375

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().