CeDEx Seminar - Salvatore Nunnari (Bocconi University)

A Model of Focusing in Political Choice

This paper develops a theoretical model of electoral competition by office-motivated candidates based on the notion that voters focus disproportionately on, and hence overweight, certain attributes of policies. In particular, we assume that voters focus more on attributes in which their options differ more. Sophisticated politicians, whose goal is to win the election or maximize their electoral support, take this attention distortion into account when crafting their political manifestos. Voters' selective attention generates inefficient policies, which cater excessively to a subset of social groups. We show that augmenting the classical models of electoral competition with voters' selective attention can contribute to explain puzzling stylized facts as the inverse correlation between income inequality and redistribution.