Mixed equilibriums in a three-candidate spatial model with candidate valence

We study a spatial model of electoral competition among three office-motivated candidates of unequal valence (one advantaged and two equally disadvantaged candidates) under majority rule assuming that candidates are uncertain about the voters’ policy preferences and that the policy space consists of three alternatives (one at each extreme of the linear policy spectrum and one in the center) and we characterize mixed strategy Nash equilibriums of the game. Counterintuitively, we show that (a) when uncertainty about voters’ preferences is high, the advantaged candidate might choose in equilibrium a more extremist strategy than the disadvantaged candidates and that (b) when uncertainty about voters’ preferences is low, there exist equilibriums in which one of the disadvantaged candidates has a larger probability of election than the disadvantaged candidate of the equivalent two-candidate (one advantaged and one disadvantaged candidate) case.     

Pure-strategy Nash equilibrium in the spatial model with valence: existence and characterization

Public Choice - Pure-strategy Nash equilibria almost never exist in spatial majority voting games when the number of positional dimensions is at least two, as the majority core is typically empty...     

A model of candidate location with endogenous valence

This work gives a theoretical explanation for the increase in campaign spending and party polarization in U.S. politics. I assume that the effectiveness of persuasive advertising, and of costly valence campaigning in general, positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters. A decline in the number of partisan voters in a constituency results in greater campaign spending by the candidates. If the voters are risk-averse, the candidates who maximize their expected office rents minus the cost of campaigning will choose divergent policy platforms strategically in order to reduce the costs of subsequent campaign spending. The degree of policy divergence positively depends on the share of nonpartisan voters for a broad class of voter disutility and candidate cost of valence functions.     

Three-candidate spatial competition when candidates have valence: stochastic voting

We study the effects of stochastic (probabilistic) voting on equilibrium locations, equilibrium vote shares and comparative statics in a setup with three heterogeneous candidates and a single-dimensional issue space. Comparing the equilibria with and without stochastic voting, we find that under an appropriate level of uncertainty about voter behavior, the model has a pure strategy Nash Equilibrium (PSNE) that is free from several non-plausible features of the PSNE under deterministic voting. This result is robust to extensions to asymmetric density and plurality maximization.     

Opposition backlash and platform convergence in a spatial voting model with campaign contributions

This paper investigates the effects of campaign contributions on candidate behavior in elections. The particular focus is on how candidates choose their platforms when they know that the positions they take will influence the level of campaign contributions that they (and their opponents) receive from concerned interest groups. The analysis is carried out in the context of a simple one- dimensional spatial voting model with two candidates and two interest groups. Since the earliest Hotelling-Downs formulations, a central issue in the literature on spatial voting has been the degree to which, under various sets of assumptions, the candidates' platforms converge in equilibrium. This paper extends that literature by examining how the introduction of interest groups making campaign contributions affects the degree of platform convergence. The paper shows that when choosing their platforms, candidates face a trade-off between generataing increased support from opponents and provoking a backlash from the opposition. An example is developed to illustrate a surprising result that can occur because of the backlash effect: the introduction of two extremist interest groups may lead the candidates to moderate their platforms, resulting in a greater degree of platform convergence than would be observed in the absence of any campaign contributions.     

Candidate and Party Strategies in Two-Stage Elections Beginning with a Primary

In the United States and Latin America, candidates for national and state-level office frequently must win primary elections in order to advance to the general election. We model policy and valence issues for office-seeking candidates facing such two-stage elections. We determine a Nash equilibrium for the candidates' optimal strategies, and we find that holding a primary is likely to increase a party's chances of winning the general election, particularly in situations where valence issues that involve the candidates' campaigning skills and that are not known prior to the campaign are more salient than policy issues. Furthermore, we find that primary elections are especially likely to benefit parties that expect to be underdogs in the general election. Our conclusions are directly relevant to U.S. politics and by extension to the strategic decisions that many Latin American parties currently confront, about whether it is strategically desirable to hold primaries.     

Democratic demand and supply: a spatial model approach to satisfaction with democracy

Satisfaction with democracy (SWD) is a commonly used indicator, and its determinants have been analysed extensively. But what does dissatisfaction with democracy substantially mean? This paper tests if satisfaction is actually a coherent consequence of citizens considering democratic supply and demand. It starts from the simple idea that satisfaction can be explained by the distance between what “should be” and what “is”; between democratic expectations and reality. I capture this idea in a spatial model of democratic support, where size and direction of the gap between citizens’ expectations and evaluations of democracy determine levels of satisfaction. I use data for 26 countries from the European Social Survey. Taking into account both expectation-surplus and evaluations-surplus gaps, I find that satisfaction is affected by both the size and the direction of the distance between expectations and evaluations. The main finding is that liberal criteria of democratic quality are generally agreed upon amongst citizens, and that a perceived lack of their realization is the strongest predictor of dissatisfaction. Democratic input dimensions like direct participation and output criteria like social justice are more disputed, and create dissatisfaction amongst those wanting more of them as well as those wanting less.     

A spatial model of legislative voting with perceptual error

This paper presents a unidimensional spatial model of voting in which members of Congress vote based on an imprecise perception of roll-call alternatives. The model is applied to the Senate roll-call votes of 1977 to estimate the ideal points of the senators, and to examine the role of a liberal-conservative dimension in describing votes on economic issues relative to social issues. In light of the spatial model, the paper argues that “standard” models of roll-call voting are not based on a theory of choice, and hence, that it is difficult to interpret their results. Alternatives to standard models, based on the spatial model, are developed and are used to analyze the role of ideology in deciding a specific economic issue: coal strip-mining.     

Limitations of the spatial model

One approach to avoiding the implications of Arrow's paradox is to impose restrictions on the preferences of voters. A restriction often assumed in the literature is that voters' preferences can be represented by a choice among points in a space, where voters' preferences are convex. We claim that these assumptions will often be unjustified. Government must often address issues of externalities or public goods, which means that the possibility frontier will not be concave. This in turn means that voters' preferences over feasible policies will not be convex.     

Candidate positioning in Britain

Policy positioning has received a great deal of attention from scholars of British politics. While numerous studies emphasize the positions taken by the Labour and Conservative parties, and how the positions of these parties have shaped citizens’ electoral behavior, few studies explore policy positioning at the candidate-level. We conduct the first quantitative study that examines the relative policy positions of British candidates during a general election. Building on findings from the study of American elections, we argue that two factors explain variation in candidate positioning in Britain: constituency-level electoral competition and a disparity in candidate quality. Using data from the 2001 British Representation Study, we find evidence that both factors are associated with a decrease in the policy contrast between candidates. Our findings suggest that, despite the differences in party control, similar factors affect candidate positioning in both Great Britain and the United States.     

A simulation model of Mexican internal migration flows: empirical application of a spatial interaction model

"In this paper spatial interaction theory is challenged in order to test if it is suitable to support the design and construction of an operative model of the Mexican internal migration flows. The main conceptual and operative aspects of the model are presented, the design and model building process is explained, the results of the calibration analysis are examined and a simulation exercise of migration policy evaluation is undertaken. The operative migration model presented in this paper seems useful to analyze and evaluate numerous migration policies, which suggest that spatial interaction theory offers a promising conceptual and operative foundation to analyze internal migration flows in Mexico." (EXCERPT)     

Candidate appearance in campaign advertisements

Many scholars have examined the nature of campaign advertising strategy across differing contexts in U.S. elections. Little attention has been devoted to exploring the incentives that candidates face to appear — or not — in their own advertisements. We argue that candidates should seek to distance themselves from potential backlash stemming from more negative messages by not appearing in negative ads. We also expect that candidates should be more likely to appear in advertisements aired during primary elections relative to general elections because candidates should use ads in this election stage to introduce themselves to voters. Furthermore, incumbents should be less likely to appear in ads than other candidates because their constituents should not need to be introduced to them. Data on candidate-sponsored television advertisements collected across four years for four different offices provides support for our expectations and suggests that candidates make strategic decisions about when to appear in advertisements.     

On disclosure policy in contests with stochastic entry

We study how a contest organizer who seeks to maximize participant effort should disclose the information on the actual number of contestants in an imperfectly discriminatory contest with stochastic entry. When each potential contestant has a fixed probability of entering the contest, the optimal disclosure policy depends crucially on the properties of the characteristic function H(?)=f(?)/f ^??(?), where f(?) is the impact function. The contest organizer prefers full disclosure (full concealment) if H(?) is strictly concave (strictly convex). However, the expected equilibrium effort is independent of the prevailing information disclosure policy if a linear H(?) (Tullock Contest) applies.     

Electoral equilibria with entry: Some simulations

The objective of this paper is to investigate by means of simulation the impact of third-party entry on the spatial separation of candidates. Specifically, we do real-time simulations of Palfrey's (1984) model of electoral equilibria with entry after relaxing some of its assumptions. Our finding that the threat of third-party entry can induce virtually the same spatial separation of the major-party candidates as entry with certainty is both a strong and interesting result.     

A test of the predictive dimensions model in spatial voting theory

We model correlated voter-candidate issue data within the framework of the Enelow-Hinich spatial model of predictive dimensions. The empirical consequences of this model of the issue data are surprising and allow for an indirect test of the Enelow-Hinich spatial model. The central prediction of the correlated data model we construct, which depends critically on the underlying spatial model, is tested with issue data from the 1980 NES pre-election interview. The test results are highly supportive of the model's predictions. We conclude both that the spatial model of predictive dimensions is empirically supported and that candidate spatial locations estimated by the model are not an artifact of correlated voter-candidate issue data.     

How does ideology matter in the spatial model of voting?

In spatial voting games without a core, if candidates are constrained on one issue, they are implicitly constrained on other issues. Thus external constraints affect optimal positions for candidates. Using new solution concepts, we find the optimal position for a candidate given any linear constraint, given an opponent’s constraint, and determine conditions when constraints are sufficient to yield unbeatable positions.