Abstract
Spatial models with a party entry decision largely fall into one of two classes. The first of these preserves the Downsian assumptions that candidates are office-seeking and can announce policy positions anywhere in the policy space. A distinct class of models features what are now known as “citizen-candidates” who combine policy and office-seeking incentives, and who cannot credibly commit to implementing any policy other than their own ‘ideal point’ as a platform in electoral campaigns. The following paper develops a game theoretic model of party entry which employs mechanisms from each of these classes of analyses, but departs from both bodies of literature in studying party entry in Parliamentary regimes with Proportional Representation. Preliminary analysis of Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium suggests that, when parties are exclusively concerned with policy, party entry should be somewhat more likely when status quo parties are well-dispersed around the median voter’s ideal point than when they are both fairly centrist. However, as candidates’ office-seeking incentives begin to outpace their policy-seeking incentives, the relationship between status quo dispersion and entry becomes more complicated, and depends crucially on the ideal point of the entering candidate.
This paper draws very heavily on earlier work by Kselman; although the authors are in alphabetical order, Kselman should clearly be considered the “first author” on this paper in the traditional sense of being a first author. A related empirical paper (co-authored with Eleanor Powell) was prepared for presentation at the The International Conference on Political Economy and Institutions (ICOPEAI), June 14–16, 2010, Baiona, Spain. We are extremely grateful for the feedback of all attendees of the conference – which inspired this chapter – but are especially appreciative of suggestions from Jon Eguia, Andrei Gomberg, Norman Schofield, and Kenneth Shepsle.
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- 1.
Lee (2007) extends models entry as a probabilistic process, demonstrating that status quo parties’ distance from the median voter’s ideal point increases in the probability of third party entry.
- 2.
When \( K = 1 \) this implies a traditional first-past-the-post system. When \( K\ >\ 1 \), this implies the single-non-transferable vote system.
- 3.
- 4.
We thus do not consider the possibility of minority governments (see Stromm 1990).
- 5.
If \( P \) only has a positive probability of being assigned formateur status given the choice \( E \) in the game’s first stage, her strategy is denoted \( {s_{P \ge 2}} = \{ \,\phi,\,{G_{P \ge 2}}(E)\,\} \), where the empty set marker \( \phi \) tells us that \( P \) has no move in the game’s third stage if \( 1 \) chooses \( \sim E \). Finally, if \( P \) has zero probability of being assigned formateur status regardless of \( 1 \)’s first stage choice her strategy is denoted \( {s_{P \ge 2}} = \{ \,\phi \,,\,\phi \,\} \)
- 6.
As with the assumption that Parliamentary seat shares perfectly reflect electoral vote shares, this assumption can be relaxed such that larger parties have a disproportionately higher chance of being assigned formateur status than smaller parties; or that smaller parties’ chances of being named formateur are disproportionate to their vote shares.
- 7.
By definition \( {\omega_P}( \cdot ) = 1 \) for single-party Cabinets and \( {\omega_P}( \cdot ) = 0 \) for parties not in government.
- 8.
This, of course, is a simplification. However, it is justifiable as both an empirical and theoretical regularity. Again, the current aim is not to develop a novel understanding of coalition formation, which might identify certain circumstances in the assumption could be violated, but rather to present a simple but justifiable model of government formation which permits investigation of the paper’s stated theoretical questions.
- 9.
Although as will be noted shortly, the relative preference for policy outcomes as opposed to ego-rents from serving in the government is a parameter in the model, and as such can be set to \( 0 \) for those interested in obtaining predictions for situations in which candidates do not care about policy; we provide examples in Sect. 3.
- 10.
In this paper we will not investigate situations in which candidates \( 2 \) and \( 3 \) are equidistant from the median voter’s ideal point such that, absent the choice to enter by candidate \( 1 \), election’s outcome would be a tie.
- 11.
The vote shares and coalition numerics which inform the following figures are available on request.
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Kselman, D.M., Tucker, J.A. (2011). A Model of Party Entry in Parliamentary Systems with Proportional Representation. In: Schofield, N., Caballero, G. (eds) Political Economy of Institutions, Democracy and Voting. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19519-8_14
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