Context-Dependent Voting and Political Ambiguity

In recent decades psychologists have shown that the standard model of individual choice is often violated. One regularly observed violation is that individual choices are influenced by the decision context. To incorporate these effects into politics, we introduce a theory of context-dependent voting for ambiguous policy environments. Context-dependence implies that preference over any pair of options depend not just on the two options but on the entire choice set. In this paper we show that context-dependence induces voters to develop a taste for policy ambiguity, even when they evaluate distances quadratically (i.e., risk aversion). We develop a formal model of electoral competition and show that if voters sufficiently weight the context of their choice then, under broad conditions, all candidate platforms must be ambiguous in equilibrium.