Spatial electoral competition with a probabilistically favored candidate

Abstract

This paper studies unidimensional electoral competition between two office-motivated candidates, where one of them enjoys a probabilistic and non-policy advantage over the other. We consider a finite number of voters who have single peaked preferences and whose ideal policies are not known to the candidates. Unlike the deterministic-advantage models we find that the Downsian pure strategy equilibrium is in this environment the unique Nash equilibrium of the game when the electorate is sufficiently large. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.