Electoral poaching and party identification

This paper studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of “party strength” based on the sizes and intensities of attachment of a party’s loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties’ strengths. In equilibrium, parties aggressively target or “poach” a portion of the opposition party’s loyal voters. Each party’s level of poaching is decreasing, and, consequently, the level of inequality in each party’s equilibrium redistribution schedule is increasing, in the opposition party’s strength. We also construct a measure of “party polarization” that is increasing in the sum and symmetry of the parties’ strengths, and find that aggregate inequality is increasing in party polarization.