Policy Reversals and Electoral Competition with Privately Informed Parties

Cesar Martinelli () and Akihiko Matsui ()
Additional contact information
Akihiko Matsui: University of Tokyo & University of Tsukuba

No 3, Working Papers from Centro de Investigacion Economica, ITAM

Abstract: We develop a spatial model of competition between two policy-motivated parties. Parties know a state of the world which determines 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. The intuition behind this result is that 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.

Keywords: spatial models; party competition; asymmetric information; separating equilibria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-01
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.itam.mx/p ... martinelli/00-03.pdf First version, 2000 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Policy Reversals and Electoral Competition with Privately Informed Parties (2002)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Centro de Investigacion Economica, ITAM
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Diego Dominguez ().