10.7910/DVN/RQNVFW Izzo, Federica Federica Izzo UCSD Harvard Dataverse 2022 Social Sciences Izzo, Federica Federica Izzo UCSD 2022-05-06 2022-10-12 10.1017/S0003055422000843 4114 3678 3304 1788 3811 2596122 161032 3296 1170 16914 13299 application/x-tex application/x-tex application/x-tex type/x-r-syntax application/x-tex text/tab-separated-values application/octet-stream application/x-tex text/plain application/mathematica application/mathematica 1.0 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Political parties sometimes adopt unpopular positions that condemn them to electoral defeat. This phenomenon is usually ascribed to expressive motives, namely parties’ desire to maintain their ideological purity. Could ideological parties instead have strategic incentives to lose? To answer this question, I present a model of repeated spatial elections in which voters face uncertainty about their preferred policy and learn via experience. The amount of voter learning, I show, depends on the location of the implemented policy: a more radical policy generates more information. This creates a trade-off for a party whose ideological stance is unpopular with the electorate, between winning the upcoming election so as to secure policy influence, and changing voters’ preferences so as to win with a better platform in the future. Under some conditions the party gambles on the future. It chooses to lose today to possibly change voters’ views and win big tomorrow.