Political polarization and selection in representative democracies

Artikel

While scholars and pundits alike have expressed concern regarding the increasingly “tribal” nature of political identities, there has been little analysis of how this social polarization impacts political selection. In this paper, we incorporate social identity into a principal-agent model of political representation and characterize the impact of social polarization on voting behavior. We show that identity has an instrumental impact on voting, as voters anticipate that political representatives’ ex post policy decisions have an in-group bias. We also conduct a laboratory experiment to test the main predictions of the theory. In contrast to existing work that suggests social polarization may have a positive impact by increasing participation, we show that social polarization causes political representatives to take policy decisions that diverge from the social optimum, and voters to select candidates with lower average quality.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Journal: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization ; ISSN: 1879-1751 ; Volume: 168 ; Year: 2019 ; Pages: 132-165 ; Amsterdam: Elsevier

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie, Anthropologie ; Design of Experiments: Laboratory, Group Behavior ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
• Subject: social identity ; political selection ; political polarization

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Duell, Dominik ; Valasek, Justin
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Elsevier ; ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
• (where): Amsterdam
• (when): 2019

Further information

• DOI: doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2019.10.004
• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/233811
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET