Vicent Pons, from Harvard Business School, will present "KEEP YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER: STRATEGIC PLATFORM ADJUSTMENTS DURING U.S. AND FRENCH ELECTIONS".

We study changes in political discourse during campaigns,  using  a novel dataset of candidate websites for U.S. House elections, 2002-2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections,1958-2022.  We find that candidates move to the center in ideology  and  rhetorical complexity between the first round (or primary) and the second round (or general election). This convergence reflects candidates’ strategic  adjustment to  their  competitor,  as  predicted  by  the median  voter  theorem:  Using  an  RDD, we  show  that  candidates  converge  to  the  platform  of opponents who narrowly qualified for the last round, as opposed to those who narrowly failed to qualify