Lies, Damned Lies, and Political Campaigns

Standard intuition from formal models of electoral competition suggests that candidates with more flexibility will dominate those with less, and consequently almost always win elections. In this paper we explore this logic formally and show that it is partly true but mostly false. Surprisingly, we find that greater flexibility can in fact work against a candidate and induce endogenously a preference by voters for less flexible candidates. Most significantly, we find that the presence of both types of candidates significantly affect the policy choices of each group, implying that misleading conclusions will be drawn if homogeneous candidate flexibility is assumed.