Centripetal Structure in Electoral Competition with Alienation-Based Abstention

Aman Ray and Srikanth B. Pai ()
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Srikanth B. Pai: Assistant Professor at Madras School of Economics, Chennai.

Working Papers from Madras School of Economics,Chennai,India

Abstract: Alienation-based abstention makes participation endogenous because the platforms chosen by parties determine who votes. We study how voter tolerance affects the existence, location, and persistence of pure-strategy equilibria in two versions of a two-party spatialmodel. In the first, office-seeking parties maximize voter plurality; in the second, they care about the policy implemented. We characterize all office-seeking equilibria through a condition called window dominance, which gives a distributional characterisation of profitable deviations both near to and far from a party’s platform. For general continuous voter distributions, pure strategy equilibrium in the office seeking game may fail to exist, may be non-unique, and may appear and disappear as tolerance increases. To resolve this, we identify a centripetal structure in the set of positions that can not lose to each rival. When this structure holds, a single anchor defeats every other platform and determines the unique office-seeking equilibrium. The classical Downs and Llavador results are special cases. We show that this structure persists at all larger tolerance radii once it holds at a radius of at least half the policy space and at least twice the median’s distance from the center. The centripetal structure emerges before full participation for all voter distributions. Finally, the same structure yields a complete classification of equilibrium when parties care about the policy implemented rather than electoral victory alone.

Keywords: spatial electoral competition; alienation-based abstention; party convergence; centripetal incentives; median voter theorem; pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. Classification-JEL: : C72; D71; D72. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 56 pages
Date: 2026-10
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