Political Parties and Policy Outcomes. Do Parties Block Reforms?

Valerio Dotti

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: I propose a model of legislative bargaining among endogenous political parties over multiple policy dimensions. I provide a characterization of (i) the partition of the legislature into parties, (ii) the policy reforms that parties propose (if any), and (iii) the policy outcome attained from these proposals. I show that - depending on the position of the status quo - either (1) the presence of parties does not affect the policy outcome and a median voter theorem holds, or (2) a party representing legislators with extreme and opposite political views - i.e., a coalition of extremes - can successfully block reforms that would be feasible if parties did not exist. Lastly, I show that the extent to which the existence of parties can increase the set of possible policy reforms is severely limited or null.

Keywords: Multidimensional policy space; Political parties; Policy reforms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100227/1/MPRA_paper_100227.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:100227

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().