Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during US and French Elections
Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec, Vincent Pons
American Economic Review · 2025 · Volume 115 · Issue 8
Abstract
We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for US House elections, 2002–2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958–2022. We find that candidates move to the center in ideology and rhetorical complexity between the first round (or primary) and the second round (or general election). This convergence reflects candidates' strategic adjustment to their opponents, as predicted by Downsian competition: Using an RDD we show that candidates converge to the platform of opponents who narrowly qualified for the last round as opposed to those who narrowly failed to qualify.
Keywords
Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior, Search, Learning, Information and Knowledge, Communication, Belief, Unawareness, Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.