Empirical support—U.S. Wisconsin
• For example, Hedlund and Watts (1986)
find that, in the open primaries of
Wisconsin from 1968 to 1984, around 30%
to 40% of the voters in Republican
primaries are Democrat identifiers or
independents, and about 40% to 45% of
the voters in the Democrat primaries are
not Democrat identifiers.
Empirical support—U.S.
presidential election
• That an open primary can strongly affect
the outcome of the primary election can be
most clearly illustrated by recent
Republican experience in primaries for
U.S. presidential election.
McCain
• The surprising victories for John McCain,
who is less preferred by the majority of
Republicans, in New Hampshire and
Michigan primaries (both open) can be
attributed to strong show-up of
Independent and Democrat who vote for
McCain in the primaries.
main purpose of this paper
• Our main purpose is to study how, and to
what extent, strategic voting behavior
affects the outcome of the primary.
• We propose a stylized two-party Hotelling
model in which one party holds a primary
election before the other.
• There are two candidates competing for
nomination.