NICEP 18/01: The Clarity Incentive for Issue Engagement in Campaigns

Summary

During election campaigns, political parties have to decide how best to allocate their scarce time and resources across a large number of issues. Given these constraints, which, and how many, issues do parties choose to emphasise? Previous empirical research on campaigns has identified several tendencies. First, rather than focusing on just one issue, parties emphasise multiple issues during campaigns. Second, parties often spend much of the campaign discussing the same issues as their opponents. Third, parties spend relatively more time discussing the issues on which they are favoured by voters – that is, issues where many voters prefer the party’s policies to those of opposing parties. Fourth, parties spend relatively more time discussing issues already considered important by many voters. While these tendencies are well documented empirically, theoretical explanations for why political parties should behave in this way have been lacking. In contrast with the empirical evidence, much of the formal theoretical literature on campaigns implies that parties should normally discuss only one issue each in campaigns, and should discuss different issues from one another.

The authors present a game-theoretic model which can account for these empirical patterns. In the model, political parties face two competing incentives when deciding which issues to emphasise during a campaign. The first incentive – "the clarity incentive" – encourages parties to emphasise an issue considered important by many voters, even when the policies the party advocates on the issue are generally unpopular. Parties have an incentive to do this in order to clarify their position on the issue for the benefit of potentially sympathetic voters who care about this issue. This novel incentive coexists and competes with the more studied "salience incentive", which encourages parties to emphasize the issues on which the policies they advocate are more popular. The authors present evidence that the clarity incentive is consistent with voter behaviour in recent British survey data. In particular, they show that voters were less likely to support a party when they did not know its position on Britain’s relationship with the EU. Moreover, this was especially the case after the surprise Conservative election victory in 2015, which precipitated the 2016 'Brexit' referendum, and so substantially increased the importance of this issue to voters. .

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Authors

Chitralekha Basu and Matthew Knowles

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