Electoral Competition and Information Aggregation

This paper investigates a common criticism of competitive elections: Candidates pander to voters and choose the most popular platform, regardless of it being optimal for the voters. I study an election with two perfectly informed candidates. Voters share common values over the policy outcome of the election, but possess arbitrarily little information about which policy is best for them. Voters elect one of the candidates, effectively choosing between the two policies proposed by the candidates. I show that there exists a sequential equilibrium where both candidates propose the ex-post optimal policy as their platform. If there is a positive probability, however small, that each candidate is of a type committed to truth-telling, the equilibrium outcome is unique: all strategic candidates propose the ex-post optimal platform in all sequential equilibria. This result is robust to the introduction of strategic voting, policy-motivated candidates, and heterogeneous preferences.