Lagerlöf, Johan, (2003), “Policy-Motivated Candidates, Noisy Platforms, and Non-Robustness,” Public Choice 114(3-4): 319-347.
Abstract This paper develops a model of a two-candidate election in which the candidates are mainly office-motivated but also to some (arbitrarily small) extent policy-motivated, and their chosen platforms are to some (arbitrarily small) extent noisy. The platforms’ being noisy means that if a candidate has chosen a particular platform, the voters' perception is that she has, with positive probability, actually chosen some other platform. It is shown that (i) an equilibrium in which the candidates play pure exists whether or not there is a Condorcet winner among the policy alternatives, and (ii) in this equilibrium the candidates choose their own favorite platforms, which means that the platforms do not converge.
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My comment: I realize that the title of this paper doesn’t sound very exciting. Maybe I should have called it “Political Economy Meets Bagwell” instead. The paper is also quite long. I would recommend anyone who is interested but thinks the paper is too lengthy to read only the introduction and Section 2; these first 12 pages are enough to understand the idea behind the paper.
