A Model of the 2000 Presidential Election: Instrumenting for Ideology

In a spatial model of voting, a voter's utility for a candidate is a func- tion of ideological distance from the candidate and a candidate's quality. Candidate quality can potentially bias the measure of ideological distance in two ways. First, voters may be more drawn to high quality candidates thereby reducing the ideological distance. Second, a candidate's ideologi- cal position is a function of rivals'qualities and his own quality. We derive a theoretical model to sign the direction of both biases analytically. Next, using techniques established in the industrial organization literature, we estimate the model using two sets of instrumental variables.