We study a model of two-candidate electoral competition. In our model, each voter has single-peaked preferences for the consequences of policies, but voters receive only partial information about which policies cause their preferred consequences. If voters’ utility functions are convex, they prefer risk, which implies that a safe alternative may not be chosen even when this alternative results in the median voter’s preferred consequence with a probability of one. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a strategic voting equilibrium in which a risky policy that causes polarized consequences defeats the median voter’s preferred alternative. Even when the convexity of voters’ utility functions is weak, which means that policy polarization is socially undesirable, if voters are likely to receive insufficient information, the chosen policy is still polarized. In that case, social welfare is minimized. However, proposals by sufficiently well-informed candidates can eliminate the uncertainty of risky policies through a signaling effect, which, in turn, eliminates the perverse consequences.

我们研究了两个候选人的选举竞争模型。在我们的模型中，每个选民对于政策的后果都有一个单一的偏好，但选民只获得有关哪些政策导致其首选后果的部分信息。如果选民的效用函数是凸性的，则他们倾向于风险，这意味着即使该替代方法导致中位选民的优选结果的可能性为1，也可能不会选择安全的替代方法。我们为战略投票均衡的存在提供了必要和充分的条件，在这种策略中，导致两极分化后果的风险性政策击败了中位选民的首选方案。即使选民的效用函数的凸性很弱，这也意味着政策两极化在社会上是不可取的，如果选民可能会收到不足的信息，选择的政策仍然两极化。在这种情况下，社会福利将降至最低。但是，消息灵通的候选人的提议可以通过信号效应消除风险政策的不确定性，从而消除有害的后果。