Primary Elections and the Provision of Public Goods

We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of “core” party voters in their respective primary elections and “swing” voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ide...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Journal of politics Vol. 80; no. 2; pp. 647 - 661
Main Authors Ting, Michael M., Snyder, James M., Hirano, Shigeo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago University of Chicago on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association 01.04.2018
University of Chicago Press
Subjects
Candidates
Capital
Capital expenditures
Elections
Government spending
Ideology
Polarization
Political parties
Predictions
Primaries & caucuses
Public good
Public goods
States
Voters
distributive politics
public goods
primary elections
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:We develop a theory of primary elections and the provision of public and private goods. In our model, candidates from two parties compete for the support of “core” party voters in their respective primary elections and “swing” voters in a general election. Candidates within a party share a fixed ideology and offer platforms that distribute a unit of public spending across group-specific private goods and public goods. Without primaries, candidates offer only public goods when they are very valuable, and only private goods to the swing group otherwise. Because public goods appeal to both types of voters, primary elections increase their provision under a broad set of conditions. The level of public good provision is nonmonotonic in ideological polarization. The prediction of increased public goods spending following the adoption of primaries matches patterns in capital expenditures across US states.
ISSN:0022-3816
1468-2508
DOI:10.1086/694788