Dear Prof.

Zudenkova,

I have thought about the following model configurations:

Alternative 1
I would like to model voting behaviour of voters that want the candidate of their
party to win the general election and care less about policy choices. My main
distinction is to have sequential primaries, meaning that voters can change their
decision as the primary process goes on and possible candidates emerge as likely
winners.
The concrete model could look like this:
There are two parties, D and R. To make it simple, it can be assumed that only one
party is having primaries and the other one has an incumbent.
Voters of D maximize their expected utility of the form

U x ( . )=P ( D wins the election )(a| y Dx|+(1a)V D ( . ) )+ P ( D loses the election )( a| y R x|+(1a)V R (.))

Where Vi changes with each primary elections that passes, possibly through points
that are added and subtracted after each primary to keep things simple. The
parameter a indicates how much voters weigh policy vs. valence.
Candidates are office-seeking and thus try to maximize their success in the primary
and afterwards in the general election.
The interesting part here would be, to see how voters change their decision as
primaries go by and the candidates collect votes.

I havent found any model like that in the literature that I have read. My concern is,
however, that I dont know how difficult this model would become. If you have any
suggestions for possible simplifications, I would be very thankful.

Alternative 2
Alternatively, I thought about taking the approach from the paper Policy-seeking
candidates who value the valence attributes of the winner (Adams & Merrill III,
2013) where they distinguish between different kinds of valence (strategic valence
and character valence). I would like to build a similar model, that additionally takes
into account primary elections and how they affect candidate policies.