IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecm/wc2000/0598.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Endogenous Party Formation in a Model of Representative Democracy

Author

Listed:
  • Marco Haan

    (University of Groningen)

Abstract

We extend the citizen candidate framework by allowing for endogenous party formation. When a party is formed, any member of that party that wants to be a candidate in the election, first has to run in the primary election of her party. We show that in equilibrium one left-wing and one right-wing party will be formed. Also, there may be a range of tiny centrist parties. At most one group of extreme citizens may not be a member of any party. For each party, at most one candidate runs in its primary election. There is a range of equilibria in which one candidate runs in the general election, but we find a unique two-candidate equilibrium. We thus show that allowing for parties to form severely restricts the range of possible equilibria in the citizen candidate model.

Suggested Citation

  • Marco Haan, 2000. "Endogenous Party Formation in a Model of Representative Democracy," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 0598, Econometric Society.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecm:wc2000:0598
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/es2000/0598.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timothy Besley & Stephen Coate, 1997. "An Economic Model of Representative Democracy," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 112(1), pages 85-114.
    2. Wittman, Donald A., 1973. "Parties as Utility Maximizers," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 67(2), pages 490-498, June.
    3. Baron, David P., 1993. "Government Formation and Endogenous Parties," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(1), pages 34-47, March.
    4. B. Curtis Eaton & Richard G. Lipsey, 1975. "The Principle of Minimum Differentiation Reconsidered: Some New Developments in the Theory of Spatial Competition," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 42(1), pages 27-49.
    5. Caillaud, B. & Tirole, J., 1999. "Party governance and ideological bias," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 43(4-6), pages 779-789, April.
    6. Martin J. Osborne & Al Slivinski, 1996. "A Model of Political Competition with Citizen-Candidates," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(1), pages 65-96.
    7. Caplin, Andrew & Nalebuff, Barry, 1997. "Competition among Institutions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 306-342, February.
    8. Martin J. Osborne, 1995. "Spatial Models of Political Competition under Plurality Rule: A Survey of Some Explanations of the Number of Candidates and the Positions They Take," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 28(2), pages 261-301, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hamlin, Alan & Jennings, Colin, 2001. "Group formation and competition: instrumental and expressive approaches," Discussion Paper Series In Economics And Econometrics 0110, Economics Division, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrei Gomberg & Francisco Marhuenda & Ignacio Ortuño-Ortín, 2004. "A model of endogenous political party platforms," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 24(2), pages 373-394, August.
    2. Massimo Morelli, 2004. "Party Formation and Policy Outcomes under Different Electoral Systems," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(3), pages 829-853.
    3. Sengupta, Abhijit & Sengupta, Kunal, 2008. "A Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition with the option to quit," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 661-674, March.
    4. Persson, Torsten & Tabellini, Guido, 2002. "Political economics and public finance," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 24, pages 1549-1659, Elsevier.
    5. Francisco Martínez-Mora & M. Socorro Puy, 2009. "Off-the-peak preferences over government size," Working Papers 2009-9, Universidad de Málaga, Department of Economic Theory, Málaga Economic Theory Research Center.
    6. Arnaud Dellis, 2022. "Does Party Polarization Affect the Electoral Prospects of a New Centrist Candidate?," Games, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-20, July.
    7. Benoît Le Maux, 2009. "Governmental behavior in representative democracy: a synthesis of the theoretical literature," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 141(3), pages 447-465, December.
    8. Antonio Merlo, 2005. "Whither Political Economy? Theories, Facts and Issues," PIER Working Paper Archive 05-033, Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania, revised 01 Dec 2005.
    9. Stefan Krasa & Mattias Polborn, 2007. "Majority-efficiency and Competition-efficiency in a Binary Policy Model," CESifo Working Paper Series 1958, CESifo.
    10. Georgy Egorov & Konstantin Sonin, 2013. "A Political Theory of Populism," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 128(2), pages 771-805.
    11. Krasa, Stefan & Polborn, Mattias, 2010. "Competition between Specialized Candidates," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 104(4), pages 745-765, November.
    12. Katsuya Kobayashi & Hideo Konishi, 2016. "Endogenous party structure," Economics of Governance, Springer, vol. 17(4), pages 317-351, November.
    13. Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay & Mandar Oak, 2022. "Party Formation and Coalitional Bargaining in a Model of Proportional Representation," Games, MDPI, vol. 13(4), pages 1-17, June.
    14. Panu Poutvaara & Tuomas Takalo, 2007. "Candidate quality," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 14(1), pages 7-27, February.
    15. Dotti, Valerio, 2019. "Political Parties and Policy Outcomes. Do Parties Block Reforms?," MPRA Paper 100227, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Sandro Brusco & Jaideep Roy, 2011. "Aggregate uncertainty in the citizen candidate model yields extremist parties," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 36(1), pages 83-104, January.
    17. Aggeborn, Linuz, 2013. "Voter Turnout and the Size of Government," Working Paper Series 2013:20, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    18. Agustin Casas, 2020. "Ideological extremism and primaries," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 69(3), pages 829-860, April.
    19. Duggan, John & Fey, Mark, 2005. "Electoral competition with policy-motivated candidates," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 490-522, May.
    20. De Donder, Philippe & Hindriks, Jean, 2007. "Equilibrium social insurance with policy-motivated parties," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 23(3), pages 624-640, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecm:wc2000:0598. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.