Opportunism and the evolution of political competition

Bilge Ozturk
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Bilge Ozturk: CECO - Laboratoire d'économétrie de l'École polytechnique - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: We study a unidimensional model of spatial competition between two parties with endogeneous party membership decisions of opportunist candidates. The parties are composed of heterogeneous politicians. There are two types of politicians. The office oriented politicians, referred to as "opportunist" politicians, care only about the spoils of the office. The policy oriented politicians, referred to as "militant" politicians have ideological preferences on the policy space. In this framework, we compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils of office are split among the two parties proportionally to their share of the vote. We study the existence of short term political equilibria and then within an evolutionary setup the stability of policies and party membership decisions of opportunist candidates.

Keywords: Political competition; Stability; Compétition électorale; Factions; Stabilité (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
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