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Many of our seminars and public events this year will continue as in person or as hybrid (online and in person) events.

Please check our website listings and Twitter feed @STICERD_LSE for updates.

Unless otherwise specified, in-person seminars are open to the public. Please ensure you have informed the event contact as early as possible.

Those unable to join the seminars in-person are welcome to participate via zoom if the event is hybrid.

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About this event

Two parties compete by making claims linking policies to outcomes. When in power, each party tends to choose its preferred policy. Voters assess these claims not through Bayesian updating, but by sequentially sampling policy-outcome pairs that confirm or refute them. The sampled cases are drawn from a distribution shaped by the incumbent's identity and the effectiveness of each policy. Our analysis highlights several phenomena: logically equivalent claims need not be politically equivalent, parties biased towards less successful policies may remain in power, political turnover may persist even when one policy is more successful, and politicians may moderate their ideological positions to influence the evidence available to voters.