Political Motivations

The motivations of actors in any strategic environment are central to both behavior and outcomes. Politics is no exception, yet consensus as to the motivations of political candidates has not been attained. To understand the types of candidate that emerge from electoral competition and the policies they choose, I develop in this paper a simple model of two candidate electoral competition when candidates may be either office or policy motivated. The model incorporates both campaign and post-election behavior of candidates. In this environment candidates converge in campaign policy positions if of homogeneous motivation. When motivations are heterogeneous and private information, incentives are radically altered for all candidates and significant divergence of policy positions results. This result implies that the interaction among candidates of different types is critical to behavior, and that misleading conclusions will be drawn if homogeneous motivation is assumed. Moreover, although office motivated candidates are favored in electoral competition, I find that their advantage is limited by the electoral mechanism and policy motivated candidates win a significant fraction of elections.