Learning in a complex world: how multidimensionality affects policymaking

Policymaking inherently involves uncertainty about policy consequences. This uncertainty leads voters to rely on their past experiences when forming beliefs about policies, which ultimately shapes their electoral decisions. Officeholders, in turn, strategically weigh how their policy choices between bold initiatives and incremental options will affect voter learning and thus their electoral prospects. While conventional wisdom suggests leading incumbents always prefer safe policies and trailing ones pursue risky gambles for resurrection, this paper develops a model of policy experimentation showing that this logic often breaks down in multidimensional policy contexts. This study’s central result identifies a strategic substitution effect, whereby trailing incumbents may moderate on certain issues, while leading ones might pursue riskier policies than they otherwise would. This finding yields novel empirical implications regarding issue salience, policy extremism, and the incumbent’s electoral prospects, which this study illustrates through a preliminary plausibility check using U.S. data.