| Publication Type | | Preprints |
| Author | | Sophie Bade |
| Year of Publication | | 2011 |
| Issue | | 2011/25 |
| Abstract | | A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice of identical platforms depends on the following two - possibly counterfactual - assumptions: 1. Issue spaces are uni-dimensional and 2. Parties are unitary actors whose preferences can be represented by expected utility functions. The main goal here is to provide an example of a two-party model in which parties offer substantially different platforms in equilibrium even though no exogenous asymmetries are assumed. In this example, some voters’ preferences over the 2-dimensional issue space are assumed to exhibit non-convexities and parties evaluate their actions with respect to a set of beliefs on the electorate. |
| Publisher | | Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods |
| Place Published | | Bonn |
| URL | | http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1946736 |
| Export | | Tagged BibTex XML |
| Download | | |
| Supplementary Material | | |
| Keywords | | Downs model, Games with Incomplete Preferences, Knightian Uncertainty, Uncertainty Aversion., Platform Divergence |
| JEL-Codes | | D81, D72, C79 |
