Elections and reputations

✍ Scribed by John O. Ledyard

• Book ID: 104631530
• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 231 KB
• Volume: 50
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0048-5829
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00124926

✦ Synopsis

While we would all probably agree with the intuition that a political candidate's reputation and that candidate's positions on the issues are both important factors in any election, it is evident that we have a long way to go before theory captures intuition.

Indeed Coughlin and Ferejohn have modeled "reputations" in diametrically opposite ways.

Coughlin treats what he calls "redistributional reputation" as a prospective phenomenon. Voters listen to candidate positions and then predict the distributional implications. These predictions of the voters are then called reputations by Coughlin, although I suspect that most of us might have chosen another word. Ferejohn, on the other hand, treats reputations as purely retrospective phenomena. Voters completely ignore anything the candidate promises and base their voting decisions entirely on the candidate's performance in office. While there are merits in both theoretical models, neither completely captures what I think of as reputation. A more detailed examination of each paper may explain why.