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We analyze how political candidates can signal their competence and show that polarization might be a way of doing this. For this purpose, we study a unidimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition in which a fraction of candidates have the ability to correctly observe a policy-relevant state of the world. We show that candidates tend to polarize, even in the absence of policy bias. This is because proposing an extreme platform has a competence signaling effect and has a strictly higher probability of winning than proposing a median platform. The degree of polarization depends on how uncertain is the state of the world.

AbstractWe analyze a competitive labor market in which workers signal their productivities through education, and firms have the option of auditing to learn workers' productivities. Audits are costly and non‐contractible. We characterize the trade‐offs between signaling by workers and costly auditing by firms. Auditing is always associated with (partial) pooling of worker types, and education is used as a signal only if relatively few workers have low productivity. Our results feature new auditing patterns and explain empirical observations in labor economics like wage differentials and comparative statics of education choices. Our analysis applies also to other signaling problems, for example, the financial structure of firms, warranties, and initial public offerings.

Those who would revolt against an autocrat often face a dilemma caused by uncertainty: they would like to revolt if the ruler would respond with democratization, but they would prefer to concede if the ruler would choose instead to violently suppress the revolution. Consequently, the autocrat must decide how to best signal his willingness to use violence in hope of deterring revolt. Using a simple signaling model, we find that rulers cannot meaningfully convey their type by transferring wealth to the citizenry. However, they can convey their type through shows of force, as long as the strong type of autocrat – who would use violent repression in the case of revolution – has a competitive advantage in displaying his strength. We additionally demonstrate that rulers favor shows of force when their willingness to suppress revolution is questioned and that citizens at times prefer to pay the direct cost of shows of force to learn about the ruler's type, rather than to remain uninformed. The results illustrate a more general result in costly signaling models: information transmission is only possible when the cost of the signal is smaller for the type that wants to distinguish himself.

This monograph surveys the current literature on game theoretic models of strategic information transmission in politics. Such work generalizes earlier models by allowing relevant information to be asymmetrically held by agents, and subsequently studying the willingness and ability of these agents to transmit information through their actions. Substantively the monograph includes models of agenda control in legislatures and elections, veto threats and debate, electoral competition, reputation building, bargaining in the shadow of war and sophisticated voting. Within each topic the principal fo

Obstruction is a time‐honored tradition in legislative politics. In many cases, obstruction can be foreseen to be ultimately unsuccessful, and in some of these cases, purely costly even to the obstructor. In this article, I construct a model of obstruction in which the individual obstruction of a fait accompli policy proposal is potentially informative precisely and ironically because it is inefficient. The theory, based on the legislators' reelection motivations, offers comparative static predictions about the frequency and length of obstruction as a function of the individual characteristics of the legislator and his or her electoral setting, including the legislator's value for reelection, the appeal of the legislator's challenger, the legislator's individual‐specific seniority, competence, and/or valence, and the visibility of the legislator's obstruction efforts to the voter. Finally, the theory illustrates the potential for transparency of legislators' individual actions to be strictly welfare reducing, even in the absence of pandering.