The goal of this paper is to understand what role campaigns play in informing voters and how this affects the behavior and policy positioning of parties.
We study this in a model in which voters and parties are rational, but have incomplete information: politicians and voters are uncertain about the state of the world and voters, without a campaign, are uncertain about what politicians will do after the election. We begin by establishing that as long as the incentives to pander to voters are not too strong, campaigning is beneficial: although campaigns have a bad reputation, without them, voters have too little information to cast an informed ballot. We then use our model to explore the concepts of (1) electoral mandates, (2) issue salience and (3) affective polarization.
