Party Formation and Minority Ideological Positions

We develop a model where voters differ in their exogenous income and in their ideological views, with racism as an illustration. Electoral competition takes place between an endogenous number of parties which propose platforms consisting of both an ideological and an economic dimension. Our objective is to explain the emergence of minority ideological positions and to understand the role played by political parties in this emergence. We first show that, in a pure citizen‐candidate model where parties are absent, the only equilibrium consists of the majority ideological position. We then show that allowance for the formation of political parties generates equilibria with minority ideological positions.