Radical Moderation: Recapturing Power in Two-party Parliamentary Systems

Tasos Kalandrakis and Arthur Spirling ()
Additional contact information
Arthur Spirling: Department of Government, Harvard University

No WP61, Wallis Working Papers from University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy

Abstract: We estimate the parameters of a reputational game of political competition using data from five two-party parliamentary systems. We find that latent party preferences (and party reputations) persist with high probability across election periods, with one exception: parties with extreme preferences who find themselves out of power switch to moderation with higher probability than the equivalent estimated likelihood for parties in government (extreme or moderate) or for moderate parties in opposition. We find evidence for the presence of significant country-specific differences. Notably, we estimate that in the long-term, Australia is less than half as likely to experience extreme policies and Australian governments enjoy significantly longer spells in office as compared to their counterparts in Greece, Malta, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. The model outperforms alternative naive models on a battery of goodness-of-fit tests.

Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2009-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wallis.rochester.edu/WallisPapers/wallis_61.pdf full text (application/pdf)
None

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:roc:wallis:wp61

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Wallis Working Papers from University of Rochester - Wallis Institute of Political Economy University of Rochester, Wallis Institute, Harkness 109B Rochester, New York 14627 U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Richard DiSalvo ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).