Political Social Learning: Short-Term Memory and Cycles of Polarization
将政治视为集体学习过程，研究选民短期记忆如何导致政党纲领在极化与共识之间循环，对理解选举动态和政策制定有参考价值。
This paper investigates the effect of voters’ short-term memory on political outcomes by considering politics as a collective learning process. We find that short-term memory may lead to cycles of polarization and consensus across parties’ platforms. Following periods of party consensus, short-term memory implies that there is little variation in voters’ data and therefore limited information about the true state of the world. This in turn allows parties to further their own interests and hence polarize by offering different policies. In contrast, periods of polarization and turnover involve sufficient variation in the data that allows voters to be confident about what the correct policy is, forcing both parties to offer this policy.