Two candidate competition on differentiated policy sets

Mathew Knudson

Games and Economic Behavior, 2020, vol. 121, issue C, 413-434

Abstract: In the classical spatial model of two candidate competition, an equilibrium exists only if the distribution of voter ideal points is such that every median hyperplane passes through a single policy. The necessity of this condition crucially depends upon both candidates being able to propose any policy in a Euclidean space. We assume that each candidate is affiliated with a party which restricts the policies that its candidate can propose and that voters have Euclidean spatial preferences. We show that if the candidates can only make proposals from disjoint sets of policies, then an equilibrium exists if each median hyperplane passes through a region with a nonempty interior that contains the equilibrium policy. An equilibrium, if it exists, is generically robust to perturbations of the voters' ideal points.

Keywords: Spatial voting; Two candidate competition; Elections; Parties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825620300403
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:gamebe:v:121:y:2020:i:c:p:413-434

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2020.03.005

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().