POLITICAL SPACES, DIMENSIONALITY DECLINE AND PARTY COMPETITION

César García-Díaz (), Gilmar Zambrana-Cruz () and Arjen van Witteloostuijn ()
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César García-Díaz: Department of Industrial Engineering, Systems Theory in Organizations Group (TESO), Universidad de los Andes, Cra. 1E 19A-40 (ML-702) Bogotá, Colombia
Gilmar Zambrana-Cruz: Department of Management, Antwerp Centre of Evolutionary Demography (ACED), University of Antwerp, Prinsstraat 13 (Z.308), Antwerpen, BE-2000, Belgium
Arjen van Witteloostuijn: Department of Organization and Strategy, Tilburg University, K1102A, 5000 LE, Tilburg, The Netherlands

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2013, vol. 16, issue 06, 1-30

Abstract: We built a computational model of political party competition in order to gain insight into the effect of the decrease in the number of relevant political issues (dimensions), and the change of their relative importance, on the number of surviving political parties, their strategy performance, and the degree of political party fragmentation. Particularly, we find that when there is a dimensionality reduction (i.e., a change from a two-dimensional issue space to a one-dimensional one, or, a substantial decrement in one of the issue's relative importance with respect to the other), the number of political parties declines, as does the overall degree of party fragmentation in the system. Regarding party strategies, we observe that, after the dimensionality reduction, (i) the inert parties tend to improve their performance in terms of party numbers (i.e., more inert parties survive, relatively speaking); (ii) the population of large-size seekers declines, (iii) the few large-size seeker survivors, in general, cushion their increased mortality hazard with increased size (i.e., increased number of supporters); and, finally, (iv) the mortality hazard increases with distance to the mean voter spot.

Keywords: Political party competition; agent-based modeling; organizational ecology; dimensionality decline (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1142/S0219525913500197

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