Rational Voter Learning, Issue Alignment, and Polarization

About this event

We model electoral competition between two parties when voters can rationally learn about their political positions through flexible information acquisition. Rational voter learning generates polarized and aligned political preferences, even when voters’ true positions are unimodally distributed and independent across policy issues. When parties strategically select their positions to influence voter learning, party and voter polarization increase as information costs decline, and parties may adopt positions more extreme than their ideal policies. These results arise from two new forces introduced by endogenous voter learning: parties gain from moderating to skew learning in their favor, but the more extreme party also gains from differentiating to trigger more voter learning.