A theory on party discipline and vote switching by legislators

We develop a new theory of vote switching by legislators that defect from party line voting. In our model, ideological candidates select their party label and, once elected, vote in parliament. Political parties select their policy platform as to maximize votes while preserving their candidates’ loyalty. We find that legislators that defect from party line voting arise within the majority party. Besides, the more legislators care about their ideology and the less about their own reputation, the more they defect from party line voting. Interestingly, when a party has larger electoral advantage and its candidates sufficiently care about their reputation, such a party can propose a more polarized policy to avoid party defectors. Our model suggests that polarization incentivizes loyalty. Finally, we discuss the robustness of our results in multi-party systems and multi-constituency systems.     

On the benefits of party competition

We study the role of parties in a citizen-candidate repeated-elections model in which voters have incomplete information. We first identify a novel “party competition effect” in a setting with two opposing parties. Compared with “at large” selection of candidates, party selection makes office-holders more willing to avoid extreme ideological stands, and this benefits voters of all ideologies. We then allow for additional parties. With strategic voting, citizens benefit most when the only two parties receiving votes are more moderate. With sincere voting, even with three parties, extreme parties can thrive at the expense of a middle party; and whether most citizens prefer two or three parties varies with model parameters.     

Reciprocity and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model where a left-wing and a right-wing political party are solely interested in the policies they pursue. We assume that voters display reciprocal behavior. By contrast, political parties are not motivated by reciprocity. We show that reciprocity may have dramatic consequences for models of voting behavior. The incentive to be kind to the median voter may ensure that a position closer to the median voter's position is adopted even if political parties are not directly interested in being elected and cannot commit to a political stance during an election campaign. Moreover, reciprocity increases incumbency advantages.     

Reciprocity and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model where a left-wing and a right-wing political party are solely interested in the policies they pursue. We assume that voters display reciprocal behavior. By contrast, political parties are not motivated by reciprocity. We show that reciprocity may have dramatic consequences for models of voting behavior. The incentive to be kind to the median voter may ensure that a position closer to the median voter's position is adopted even if political parties are not directly interested in being elected and cannot commit to a political stance during an election campaign. Moreover, reciprocity increases incumbency advantages.     

Party voting discipline and the power of parties, legislators and states

We examine the distribution of decision-making power among the principal actors of a federal legislative system; parties, legislators, and constituencies. We are especially interested in how the balance of power between legislators and constituencies depends on the voting discipline exercised by the parties.We derive power measures that are related to the Banzhaf-Coleman index of decision-making power and illustrate with a simple example. Our power measures are novel because they are based on an explicit representation of party voting discipline as well as the structural properties of the decision-making process, whereas previous analyses concentrate on structurally determined power alone.     

A Spatial Theory of News Consumption and Electoral Competition

We characterize the optimal editorial positions of the media in a model in which the media influence both voting behaviour and party policies. Political parties are less likely to choose partisan policies when more voters consume informative news. When there are two media outlets, each should be slightly biased relative to its audience in order to attract voters with relatively extreme views. Voter welfare is typically higher under a duopoly than under a monopoly. Two media outlets under joint ownership may provide more diverse viewpoints than two independent ones, but voter welfare is not always higher.     

Policy Reversals and Electoral Competition with Privately Informed Parties

We develop a spatial model of competition between two policy-motivated parties. The parties know which policies are desirable for voters, while voters do not. The announced positions of the parties serve as signals to the voters concerning the parties' private information. In all separating equilibria, when the left-wing party attains power, the policies it implements are to the right of the policies implemented by the right-wing party when it attains power. Intuitively, when right-wing policies become more attractive, the left party moves toward the right in order to be assured of winning, while the right-wing party stays put in a radical stance.     

Does Party Matter? An Historical Test Using Senate Tariff Votes in Three Institutional Settings

This article investigates the historical impact of party andconstituency preferences on tariff votes from the U.S. Senateover the period 1883–1930. We find that the estimatedeffect of party grows during periods in which legislative institutionsfavored strong parties. We conclude that party has a causaleffect on policy. If party serves solely as a proxy for unmeasuredcomponents of personal ideology or constituency preferences,then the estimated effect of party on policy outcomes shouldnot vary contemporaneously with changes in legislative institutions.But if party has an independent causal impact on policy outcomes,then changes in institutions favoring strong parties shouldlead to a greater effect of party on voting behavior, holdingconstituency preferences constant. Although our findings arelimited to votes over tariffs in the 19th and early 20th centuries,they suggest that further research into the mechanism by whichparty affects political decision making is important.     

Electoral competition under imperfect information

Summary. This paper considers electoral competition between two office-motivated parties and one voter, in the presence of two alternative policies and under imperfect information. The theory of refinements of Nash equilibrium predicts the outcome of this three-player game: both parties faithfully use their information and try to find the best policy for the voter. We discuss the meaning of this model for Politics and prove that the same result holds for any number of voters, provided that parties are expected plurality maximizers and that voters satisfy a version of the sincere voting assumption adapted to this strategic setting.Received: 12 December 2001, Revised: 16 June 2003JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D72, D82.Correspondence to: Jean-François LaslierThanks to Gabrielle Demange, Françoise Forges, Roger Guesnerie, Jean-Fran çois Mertens, Thomas Palfrey, Sylvain Sorin and other participants in workshops and conferences in Caen, Paris, Caltech and Yale. Thanks also to two anonymous referees and to Paul Heidues and Johan Lagerlöf for their comments. This work was originated when K. Van der Straeten was at THEMA (Université de Cergy-Pontoise) and DELTA.     

Trade Policy Platforms of Competing Parties: What Makes Them Different?

Theoretical voting models predict convergence of two parties' trade policy platforms. In contrast, real-world observations reveal substantial differences in the platforms of competing parties. This paper modifies the standard probabilistic voting model in a way that allows for divergence of policy platforms. Two parties are shown to adopt different policy platforms if the impact of trade policy choices on expected election outcomes depends on the specific identity of the policy-promising party; that is, if the chance to win depends not only on what trade policy is promised but also on which party does the promising.     

The Political Economy of Xenophobia and Distribution: The Case of Denmark*

For the first time in some years, a conservative government came to power in Denmark in 2001, due primarily to the citizenry's disaffection with social‐democratic policies on immigration. We represent political competition in Denmark as taking place over two issues—the size of the public sector and immigration—and model political equilibrium using the party unanimity Nash equilibrium (PUNE) concept, which generates equilibria on multi‐dimensional policy spaces where parties form endogenously. By fitting the model to Danish data, we argue that citizen xenophobia may be expected to decrease the size of the Danish public sector by an amount between 12% and 36% of one standard deviation of the probability distribution of citizens' ideal points of the size of the public sector.     

Vox Populi,Vox Dei? Tacit collusion in politics

We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting. This model entails multiple equilibria, and we focus on cases where political collusion occurs. When parties hold different opinions on some policy, they may take different policy positions that do not coincide with the median voter's preferred policy platform. In contrast, when parties have a mutual understanding on a particular policy, their policy positions may converge (on some dimension) but not to the median voter's preferred policy. That is to say, parties can tacitly collude with one another, despite political competition. Collusion may collapse, for instance, after the entry of a new political party. This model rationalizes patterns in survey data from Sweden, where politicians on different sides of the political spectrum take different positions on economic policy but similar positions on refugee intake—diverging from the average voter's position, but only until the entry of a populist party.     

Nash equilibrium and party polarization in an electoral model with mixed motivations

We study the existence problem of Nash equilibrium as well as the patterns of equilibrium policy outcomes in an electoral competition model with mixed motivations. Each party maximizes a sum of party members’ expected utility and office rent. The inclusion of office rent renders the payoff of each party discontinuous. This makes it difficult to apply usually fixed point arguments to prove the existence of Nash equilibria. By using a recently developed concept, multiple restrictional security (MR‐security) we provide conditions under which a pure‐strategy Nash equilibrium exists within fairly general settings, and further the analysis by presenting conditions under which various patterns of policy choices, including polarization, arise in equilibrium.     

Economic reform, voting, and local political intervention: Evidence from India

This paper uses the Indian tariff reforms of the early nineties to estimate how voters hurt by economic reforms respond. Regions more hurt by the tariff reform increased their support for both the party that initiated their suffering and parties with similar preferences in favor of poverty-centric policies. This response is surprisingly sophisticated, where voters did not simply punish incumbents for negative income shocks and correctly discounted initial anti-reform stances by opposition parties that later turned out to be false. Furthermore, the strength of this voting response varied with both geography and local political incentives, suggesting that the economic effects of reforms might vary substantially in large and decentralized democracies.     

Voting in small networks with cross-pressure

We present a model of participation in elections in small networks, in which citizens suffer from cross-pressures if voting against the alternative preferred by some of their social contacts. We analyze how the existence of cross-pressures may shape voting decisions, and so, political outcomes; and how parties may exploit this effect to their interest. We characterize the strong perfect equilibria of the game and show that, in equilibrium, the social network determines which party wins the election. We also show that to dispose of the citizens better connected in the network with the other faction is not a guarantee to win the election.      

Party hacks and true believers: The effect of party affiliation on political preferences

This paper examines the effect of party affiliation on an individual's political views. To do this, we exploit the party realignment that occurred in the U.S. due to abortion becoming a more prominent and highly partisan issue over time. We show that abortion was not a highly partisan issue in 1982, but a person's abortion views in 1982 led many to switch parties over time as the two main parties diverged in their stances on this issue. We find that voting for a given political party in 1996, due to the individual's initial views on abortion in 1982, has a substantial effect on a person's political, social, and economic attitudes in 1997. These findings are stronger for highly partisan political issues, and are robust to controlling for a host of personal views and characteristics in 1982 and 1997. As individuals realigned their party affiliation in accordance with their initial abortion views, their other political views followed suit.     

Lobbying,political competition and the welfare effect of campaign contribution tax

This paper develops a probabilistic voting model in which a single lobby group commits campaign contributions to parties, contingent on the policy position the party adopts. Parties may have different propensities for diverting campaign funds towards rents. We show that a party that skims more from contributions mobilises fewer uninformed voters but places more value on receiving greater contributions. Further, the contributions and vote share of the party increases with the distance between the lobby's preferred policy and the median voter's ideal policy. Finally, we show that the equilibrium policy is between the median voter's ideal point and the lobby's preferred policy. Such an equilibrium policy does not maximise the aggregate social welfare due to the distortionary nature of lobbying. However, when an appropriate contribution tax is introduced to limit this distortion, social welfare will be maximised.     

Distributive politics with other-regarding preferences

This paper analyzes a nonsmooth model of probabilistic voting with two parties and a broad family of other-regarding behavior, including fairness and quasi-maximin preferences, income-dependent altruism, and inequity aversion. The paper provides conditions for equilibrium existence and uniqueness. It also characterizes the Nash equilibrium in pure strategies when parties hold either symmetric payoffs, or minor forms of asymmetries. The characterization shows that the two parties converge to an equilibrium policy that maximizes a mixture of a “self-regarding utilitarian” social welfare function and an aggregate of society's other-regarding preferences. These results are shown to be applicable to other nonsmooth frameworks, such as probabilistic voting with loss averse voters. The characterization also shows that the direction and the size of the inefficiencies emerging from electoral competition depend in a subtle way on the nature of the other-regarding preferences (and resp., loss aversion).     

Existence and Uniqueness of Nash Equilibrium in Electoral Competition Games: The Hybrid Case

This paper analyzes the traditional unidimensional, two‐party electoral competition game when parties have mixed motivations, in the sense that they are interested in winning the election, but also in the policy implemented after the contest. In spite of having discontinuous payoffs, this game, referred to as the hybrid election game, is shown to be payoff secure and reciprocally upper semi‐continuous. Conditional payoffs, however, are not quasi‐concave. Hence, the existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium (psne ) is ensured only if parties have homogenous interests in power. In that case, an equilibrium not only exists, but it is also unique. Instead, if parties have heterogeneous motivations, depending upon the relationship between the electoral uncertainty, the aggregate opportunism, and its distribution across parties, a psne may or may not exist. The mixed extension, however, is always better reply secure. Therefore, a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium does indeed exist.     

How Much Does the State of the Economy Influence the Popularity of Austrian Parties? An Empirical Investigation

We estimate popularity functions for the Austrian parties Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), Social Democrats (SPÖ) and Austrian Freedom party (FPÖ) between 1987 and 2010 (using annual data) as well as vote functions for the same Austrian parties in the 86 election districts in the national elections in 1999, 2002, 2006 and 2008. In most cases we find a statistically significant and theoretically predicted influence of three economic variables, namely the unemployment rate, inflation rate and growth rate of income, on both popularity and voting behavior. However, this influence is not robust and shows a tendency to decline over time.