The Drawbacks of Electoral Competition

We examine the effect of the number of candidates and the impact of ideology on the efficiency of the electoral process. We show that the tendency to focus on policies that provide particularistic benefits increases with the number of candidates to the expense of policies that benefit the population at large. Thus, the efficiency of policies provided in an electoral equilibrium worsens when the number of candidates increases. We next show that partisan voters are disadvantaged in the process of redistributive politics, and that the larger the fraction of voters who vote ideologically, the less efficient the political process. This is because electoral competition focuses on swing voters, increasing the values of policies with targetable benefits. ∗Department of Economics, Fisher Hall, Princeton University, Princeton NJ 08544; email: [email protected]; Web: http://www.princeton.edu/ ̃lizzeri. Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia PA 19104; email: [email protected]. Web: http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/ ̃persico. The authors are grateful to NSF for financial support, under grants SBR 9711355 and 9905564, respectively.