Politikacıların tavır değiştirdiği bir seçim rekabeti modeli

We introduce a two-candidate electoral competition model in which the candidates are free to deviate from their past announcements during the campaign stage, i.e., "flip-flop", and implement policies different from campaign promises when in office. In our model the candidates have ideal positions as well as past political announcements or behavior. They only care about winning the election but it is costly for them to flip-flop or implement policies different from their campaign promises. Voters are completely informed about the candidates' preferences and vote for the candidate whom they think will implement the policy that is closest to their ideal position. We analyze the equilibrium of this model and show that there is platform divergence even though the candidates are only motivated by office. We also analyze the factors determining the extent of flip-flopping. We extend this model to allow for incomplete information so that the voters do not know whether the candidate is a commitment type who never flip-flops and always keeps her campaign promises or an opportunist who masquerades as a commitment type by not flip-flopping. We analyze this model under the assumption that candidates' cost of implementing a policy different from campaign promises is very high and obtain results similar to those in the model with complete information.