Multicandidate Equilibrium in American Elections

James Adams

Public Choice, 2000, vol. 103, issue 3-4, 297-325

Abstract: The United States presidential election of 1992 is an example of a multicandidate contest involving both Democratic and Republican candidates. Using a spatial modelling approach, I analyze candidate policy strategy for such elections, under the assumption that voters choose according to the multivariate voting model of behavioral research. This model represents voters' decisions as probabilistic functions of their policy preferences and political partisanship. I suggest reasons why partisan voting motivates candidates to locate near their party's partisans in the policy space, and illustrate this argument with respect to the 1992 presidential election. The results of computer simulations suggest that these motivations lead to multicandidate spatial equilibria, which are robust to changes in the model's parameters. Partisanship appears to be an important source of stability in multicandidate electoral competition. Copyright 2000 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:103:y:2000:i:3-4:p:297-325

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().