Electoral poaching and party identification

This article studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of `party strength\u27 based on the sizes and intensities of a party\u27s loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties\u27 strengths. In equilibrium, parties target or `poach\u27 a strict subset of the opposition party\u27s loyal voters: offering those voters a high expected transfer, while `freezing out\u27 the remainder with a zero transfer. The size of the subset of opposition voters frozen out and, consequently, the level of inequality in utilities generated by a party\u27s equilibrium redistribution schedule is increasing in the opposition party\u27s strength. We also construct a measure of `political polarization\u27 that is increasing in the sum and symmetry of the parties\u27 strengths, and find that the expected ex-post inequality in utilities of the implemented policy is increasing in political polarization