Electoral Competition in 2-Dimensional Ideology Space with Unidimensional Commitment

Marcin Dziubinski and Jaideep Roy

No 598693, Working Papers from Lancaster University Management School, Economics Department

Abstract: We study a model of political competition between two candidates with two orthogonal issues, where candidates are office motivated and committed to a particular position in one of the dimensions, while having the freedom to select (credibly) any position on the other dimension. We analyse two settings: a homogeneous one, where both candidates are committed to the same dimension and a heterogeneous one, where each candidate is committed to a different dimension. We characterise and give necessary and suffcient conditions for existence of convergent and divergent Nash equilibria for distributions with a non-empty and an empty core. We identify a special point in the ideology space which we call a strict median, existence of which is strictly related to existence of divergent Nash equilibria. A central conclusion of our analysis is that for divergent equilibria, strong extremism (or differentiation) seems to be an important equilibrium feature.

Keywords: Spatial Voting; Two Issues; Uni-Dimensional Commitment; StrictMedian; Extremism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Related works:
Journal Article: Electoral competition in 2-dimensional ideology space with unidimensional commitment (2011)
Working Paper: Electoral Competition in 2-Dimensional Ideology Space with Unidimensional Commitment (2008)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lan:wpaper:598693

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