Political competition

Nomination: In search of the 'big:rsquo; model of political competition by Michael Laver, p.179
Reflections: Coalition politics and representative democracy by Norman Schofield, p.183     

Political competition

Abstract Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on one-dimensional policy model or on a constant-sum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two-dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions. Under certain conditions an equilibrium in the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti-core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.     

浅谈经济竞争中机会均等的公平竞争原则

市场经济是以竞争机制作为资源配置和利益分配功能的经济运行机制,但这种竞争必须是机会均等的公平竞争。为进一步完善竞争性市场经济体制,必须贯彻经济竞争中机会均等的公平竞争原则。为此,必须赋予各类经济主体平等参与市场竞争的主体资格,同时给予所有经济主体参与市场竞争的平等待遇。唯其如此,才能实现经济竞争中内蕴的优化资源配置、提高经济效率的目的。     

Revealing information in electoral competition

Electoral competition between two expert candidates may lead to inefficient platform choices. The present paper studies electoral competition between two experts and a third uninformed candidate. The latter behaves populistically. This seemingly useless candidate restores efficiency. The paper then endogenizes information acquisition. If the information acquisition costs are low, then equilibria with (i) three expert candidates or (ii) two experts and one uninformed candidate may arise. There are costs such that the latter equilibrium is the only pure strategy equilibrium in which information is transmitted.     

Rent seeking and market competition

This paper emphasizes that political behavior of interest groups is a result of economic calculation, and therefore is affected by the market conditions under which they operate. We develop a two-stage game to link political and market decision-making. We find that if unproductive rent-seekingdirectly contributes to rent-seekers' market operations, then their lobbying efforts will be excessive if the number of outsiders is relatively large, restrained if it is relatively small. If rent-seekingdirectly impairs rent-seekers' market operations, the above described behavior will be reversed. The analysis also reveals that as wasteful rent-seeking may increase rent-seeker's production cost, market competition shifts production from now less efficient rent-seekers to their non-rent-seeking rivals. Welfare gains from this shift may overshadow the direct waste of influence activities.     

论政府的服务竞争

自从无限政府、全能政府的神话被接二连三地打破以来,为了获得投资,发展经济,一个国家内部各级政府之间,世界上各个国家、各个地区的政府之间相互展开了激烈的服务竞争.本文认为,政府的服务竞争切不可满足于浅层次的花样翻新,而应该从放松政府对经济事务的直接管制入手.放松管制有利于促进市场的繁荣,转变政府的职能;过度管制则容易产生一个只知道通过行政权力把别人所创造的财富转移到自己手中来的畸形社会,彻底败坏政府的形象、信誉和权威,削弱政府的服务竞争能力.     

European parties' performance in electoral competition

Abstract: This article focuses on competition for votes between parties, as it existed in Western Europe in the period of the direct election to the European Parliament in 1989. Following earlier research by Van der Eijk and Niemöller, an instrument is introduced to measure the probability of party choice of EC citizens which establishes the likelihood of respondents to vote for any of the nationally relevant options/parties. A number of substantive conclusions about political parties'competitive performance result from this research. First, a single mechanism seems to structure electoral competition in all EC member-countries. Second, the competitive performance of political parties is not affected by their governmental status, their ideological position, and the degree of politicisation of the electoral environment. And third, parties'competitive performance is strongly affected by the degree of uniqueness of their electoral potential, their mobilising capacities, their ideological extremity and their sheer size.     

Interstate tax competition after TRA86

When a governor announces that a tax increase is necessary, how do voters decide whether the governor is representing the situation honestly, or just preparing to line his or her pockets? This paper presents evidence that voters may look at the tax increases in neighboring states to obtain information on whether a tax increase is appropriate and, using this information, decide whether to reelect their governor. The data suggest that comparisons with neighbors influence gubernatorial behavior: Governors are more likely to raise taxes when neighbors are doing the same. TRA86 allows us an extra check on the rnodelpresented: I f the marginal dollar taken in state taxes is more costly to state residents, this may increase the extent to which residents use information provided through neighboring states to sort good governors from bad.     

Communication and competition in environmental studies

College-bound students and graduate students interested in environmental studies and environmental science have hundreds of programs to choose from, and potential suitors in the academy are eager to be noticed. This article considers how purveyors of environment-related degree programs and majors use branding and other communication strategies as they compete for students and other coveted resources. Departmental and degree nomenclature is examined so as to discern how academic institutions respond to changing intellectual fashions and popular interest in environmental affairs. This analysis is aided by Harold D. Lasswell’s insights into the politics of communication.     

Multiparty spatial competition with probabilistic voting

I develop a general model of multiparty competition in which parties model voters' choices by means of probabilistic choice rules. The model is specified in terms of an issue salience coefficient which varies with the importance voters attach to issues, as opposed to unmeasured nonissue motivations. I show that when the policy salience coefficient is sufficiently low, then both vote-maximizing and rank-maximizing parties have a dominant strategy: to adopt the “most popular platform,” which maximizes voter utilities over the entire electorate. This most popular platform therefore represents a convergent equilibrium when all parties are vote- or rank-maximizing. Numerical estimates suggest that this equilibrium result holds for degrees of issue voting which exceed the parameters behavioral researchers have estimated for various historical elections.     

Electoral competition and the welfare state

The article investigates how parties compete over the welfare state by emphasising specific welfare state issues. The core argument is that two issue-specific factors determine how much parties emphasise individual welfare state issues: the character of policy problems related to the policy issues and the type of social risks involved. To test the argument, a new large-N dataset is employed, with election manifestos from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The dataset contains information on how much parties have talked about health care, education, and labour market protection in national elections since 1980. With the data at hand, it is possible to provide the first systematic investigation of how parties compete for votes over the welfare state. The approach here is able to explain the empirical fact that health care is consistently receiving increased attention everywhere, while particularly labour market protection has witnessed a decline in attention.     

Competence and ambiguity in electoral competition

The level of competence that voters attribute to different candidates is an important determinant of election results. In addition, it is observed that some candidates tend to be more ambiguous in their campaigns regarding future plans, while others commit to specific policies. We offer a model where politicians who vary in their level of competence compete by making costly campaign declarations. We show that a separating equilibrium exists in which the ambiguity of a candidate’s campaign declaration reveals her level of competence. The model explains how politicians may use an “issue”-based campaign to create a competent image, and provides an additional explanation for different levels of campaign ambiguity.