Centrifugal incentives in multi-candidate elections

This paper analyzes factors that affect candidates' position-taking incentives in multi-candidate and multi-party elections. Following Cox (1990), we define centrifugal incentives as those that motivate vote-seeking candidates to take more extreme positions relative to the center of the voter distribution. For a multivariate vote model that includes a Left-Right policy component, a party identification component and an unmeasured term that renders the vote choice probabilistic, we present theoretical and computer simulation results that quantify candidates' incentives to shift their policies away from the center in the direction of their partisan constituencies' mean policy preferences. Centrifugal incentives are found to increase with (1) the salience of policies and party identification, (2) the size of the candidate field, (3) the size of a candidate's partisan constituency and (4) more extreme constituency policy preferences. Thus, ceteris paribus, candidates who represent large constituencies are motivated to present more extreme policies than are candidates who represent small ones.