Political-economic equilibrium when parties represent constituents: The unidimensional case

John Roemer

Social Choice and Welfare, 1997, vol. 14, issue 4, 479-502

Abstract: A political-economic environment is studied in which two parties, representing different constituencies of citizens, compete over a proportional tax rate to be levied on private endowments, to finance a public good. Although parties know the distribution of citizen traits (preferences and endowments), they are uncertain about the distribution of traits among the citizens who will turn up at the polls. This uncertainty engenders an endogenously derived function (t1, t2) giving the probability that any one tax policy t1 will defeat another t2 in the election. Equilibrium existence theorems are proved, and the nature of equilibrium is compared with the equilibrium that exists when Downsian parties (ones whose objective is to maximize the probability of victory) face uncertainty. Both constituency-representing parties and uncertainty are needed to generate equilibria in which parties propose different policies.

Date: 1997-09-30
Note: Received: 4 April 1995/Accepted: 2 April 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00355/papers/7014004/70140479.pdf (application/pdf)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/0035 ... 14004/70140479.ps.gz (application/postscript)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

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:spr:sochwe:v:14:y:1997:i:4:p:479-502

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().