On committed citizen-candidates

Abstract

I study if the equilibria of the citizen-candidate model analyzed in Osborne and Slivinski (1996) are robust to some degree of commitment from candidates. In analogy with their notion of "sincere" voting, I consider one of "sincere" commitment: commitment is costless to positions closer to one's ideal point than any other candidate's position, but it is too costly to positions further away. With "sincere" voting this ensures candidates always vote for themselves. I show hat, for the most common population distributions, all the multiple candidate equilibria analyzed in Osborne and Slivinski (1996) are not equilibria in this model, as the unique equilibrium with four or less candidates has a single candidate entering.