Introduction

In this chapter, we analyze candidate strategies for the U.S. presidential elections of 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2000 under the unified turnout model developed in Chapter 7. In exploring these elections we (1) focus on the divergence between the candidates' optimal strategies and how differing degrees of policy divergence between Democratic and Republican partisans affect the degree of divergence of optimal strategies, and (2) extend our analysis to encompass a fully unified turnout model in which voters discount the candidates' policy positions – a possibility that is empirically supported by Lacy and Paolino's (1998) analysis of voting in U.S. presidential elections.

Consistent with the theoretical analyses presented in Chapter 7, we find that for every presidential election we examine, the major party candidates had electoral incentives to present divergent policies when voters chose according to the unified turnout model. We also conclude that the degree of candidate divergence at equilibrium increases with the amount of divergence between the Democratic and Republican partisans. Finally, we find that policy discounting by voters would give the candidates additional incentives to diverge in the policy space, but not to diverge as much as the preferred positions of their partisan constituencies or the actual (perceived) positions of the candidates. We conclude that voters' turnout decisions are important for candidate strategies, an effect office-seeking candidates should take into account.

Hypotheses on Voting Behavior and Candidate Strategies under the Unified Turnout Model

We begin with two hypotheses about candidate strategies that we will test using data from the five American election studies. Each hypothesis applies to candidates' margin-maximizing policy positions for an empirically estimated turnout model.