Vote Splitting, Reelection and Electoral Control: Political Gridlocks, Ideology and the War on Terror

Abstract

This article presents a game-theoretic model of voting and political bargaining where voters have two instruments for controlling politicians: vote splitting and reelection. It shows that vote splitting may totally offset the traditional reelection control mechanism, which suggests an application to the American 2004 Presidential elections. When reelection is useful, voters tend to have more flexible reelection criteria when they believe the true state of the world is likely to be unfavorable. Furthermore, there will be government shutdown with positive probability. Political gridlocks constitute an information revelation mechanism that improves subsequent control. The model is robust to voters’ ideological heterogeneity.