Partisan affect and political outsiders

TL;DR

This paper models how introducing political outsiders affects nominations, policies, and voter welfare, highlighting the role of partisan affect and its impact on polarization and welfare outcomes.

Contribution

It develops a sequential game model incorporating partisan affect to analyze outsider nominations and their effects on policy and voter welfare.

Findings

Outsider victories tend to increase policy polarization.

Partisan affect influences voter welfare more than extremism.

Introducing outsiders can alter the policy landscape and election outcomes.

Abstract

We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and parties in turn decide which offer to accept; this process conforms the voting ballot. Embedded in the evaluation of a party-candidate match is partisan affect, a variable comprising the attitudes of voters towards the party. Partisan affect may bias the electorate's appraisal of a match in a positive or negative way. We characterize the conditions that lead to the nomination of an outsider and determine whether her introduction as a potential candidate has any effect on the winning policy and on the welfare of voters. We find that the victory of an outsider generally leads to policy polarization, and that partisan affect has a more significant effect on welfare than ideology extremism.