WHY DOES A TWO‐PARTY SYSTEM EXIST?: A NEW ECONOMIC EXPLANATION

Shin-ichi Fukuda ()

Economics and Politics, 1992, vol. 4, issue 3, 277-288

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to present a new economic explanation for why a multiple‐party system can endogenously arise as a result of the electoral process. The traditional view on the electoral process (i.e., the median voter theorem) is that political parties that pursue policies in the interest of the median voter are led to a convergence of policies. However, this view cannot explain why either conservative or liberal parties win election in many democratic countries. In order to explain this paradox, the following model considers an economy with three types of parties: conservative, middle, and liberal parties. In the model, the policy of each party is assumed to be time‐consistent, so that the policy of the middle party generally leads to suboptimal outcomes for the majority voters. Thus, the “rational” majority voters try to elect the political party whose objective is biased. As a result, the electoral process may lead to a two‐party system where both conservative and liberal parties have a chance to win election.

Date: 1992
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0343.1992.tb00088.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecopol:v:4:y:1992:i:3:p:277-288

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0954-1985

Access Statistics for this article

Economics and Politics is currently edited by Peter Rosendorff

More articles in Economics and Politics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().