Swing voters, core voters, and distributive politics

Abstract

How do political parties allocate targetable goods – such as private goods targeted to individuals, local public goods targeted to geographic areas, or tax breaks targeted to specific industries or firms – in order to optimize their electoral prospects? A continuing debate on this question pits those who lean toward Cox and McCubbins's (1986) “core voter model” against those who lean toward Lindbeck and Weibull's (1987) “swing voter model.” Both models envision two parties competing to win an election by promising to distribute targetable goods to various groups, should they be elected. Cox and McCubbins argue that vote-maximizing parties will allocate distributive benefits primarily to their core voters. A typical response embodying the swing voter logic is Stokes's (2005: 317): “voters who are predisposed in favor of [a party] on partisan or programmatic grounds [– that is, its core voters –] cannot credibly threaten to punish their favored party if it withholds [distributive] rewards. Therefore the party should not waste rewards on them.” In this chapter, I first review the literature and then note that extant models focus solely on persuasion (defined as an attempt to change voters' preferences between given alternatives). Once one brings coordination (defined as an attempt to affect the number and character of alternatives from which voters choose) and mobilization (defined as an attempt to affect whether or not citizens participate in the election) into analytic view, the argument that vote-maximizing parties should focus their distributive benefits on core voters is substantially strengthened.

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