Electoral contests over voter beliefs

Voter perceptions of candidates are the substrate on which campaigns act. It is costly, however, for voters to devote enough attention to politics to change their own perceptions of candidates. This paper views campaigns—and the time, effort, and money they expend—as subsidizing rationally inattentive voters' adoption of new beliefs about candidate platforms. We employ an all‐pay contest to model costly competition over voter perceptions. In our baseline model, campaigns seek to improve perceptions of their own candidates. In a variant, candidates engage in negative campaigning. Among other results, we observe platform divergence under more reasonable informational assumptions than previous spatial models, replacing candidate uncertainty about voters with voter uncertainty about candidates. This model serves as a bridge between behavioral research on campaigns and theoretical literature on elections, offering a richer set of empirical predictions while preserving the insights of the canonical Downsian framework as a limiting case.