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September 4, 2025

Moving toward the center

How do politicians adjust their messages based on who they're running against?

Tyler Smith

Source: hadrian

Political scientists have long argued that there are good theoretical reasons for believing that politicians adjust their messages to win over centrist voters. But there is little empirical evidence that they do this in practice.

In a paper in the 蝌蚪网 Review, authors , , , and show that candidates systematically move toward the political center between the first and second rounds of an election, specifically adjusting to mirror whomever they're facing in the final round.

The researchers drew their conclusions from analyzing thousands of candidate websites and manifestos from French and US elections. By studying elections where the identity of the final opponent in the second round (France) or general election (US) was essentially random—cases where, in the first round or primary election, one potential opponent barely beat another by razor-thin margins—they were able to isolate whether candidates responded to their specific rival or just adjusted to appeal more broadly to centrist voters. For example, in French elections, a centrist politician who ranked first in the first round of voting may move left or right, depending on whether they face a left-wing or right-wing runner-up.

Panel A of Figure 5 from the authors’ paper shows their regression discontinuity estimates, which illustrates politicians’ strategic convergence to their rival.

from Di Tella et al. (2025)

The graph plots, on the horizontal axis, the first-round vote gap between the two potential opponents (qualified opponents vs. runners-up). The vertical axis is the change in similarity, from first to second round, between the platform of the leader (for instance, the politician ranked first in the first round of voting, in French elections) and the platform of each potential opponent. 

The chart shows a sharp jump at the threshold where candidates qualify for the final round in an election. When the running variable on the x-axis crosses from negative (runner-up) to positive (qualified opponent), there's a distinct convergence between electoral platforms, demonstrating that leaders systematically adjust more toward opponents who qualified than toward those who narrowly missed the cut.

Moreover, the authors find that these strategic adjustments vary by political system. In the highly polarized US two-party system, politicians rarely move toward the ideology of their opponent. But they are more flexible in how they adjust the complexity of their language—simplifying or sophisticating their rhetoric to match their opponent's style. Meanwhile, French politicians, operating in a more fluid multiparty system, will move ideologically left or right as needed to counter their specific opponent.

The findings provide confirmation of the forces behind the . And they also suggest that democracy's competitive marketplace works as intended, pushing candidates toward positions that can attract broader coalitions of voters.