IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/pseose/halshs-01310250.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Opportunist politicians and the evolution of electoral competition

Author

Listed:
  • Jean-François Laslier

    (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PSE - Paris-Jourdan Sciences Economiques - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris sciences et lettres - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Bilge Ozturk Goktuna

    (GSU - Galatasaray University)

Abstract

This paper studies a uni-dimensional model of electoral competition between two parties with two types of politicians. ‘Opportunist' ones care only about the spoils of the office, and ‘militant' ones have ideological preferences on the policy space. Opportunist politicians review their affiliations and may switch parties, seeking better election prospects. In this framework, we compare a winner-take-all system, where all the spoils of office go to the winner, to a proportional system, where the spoils of office are split among the two parties in proportion to their vote shares. We study the existence of short term political equilibria and the dynamics and stability of policies and of party membership decisions. In the long run, it is possible that proportional systems see opportunist politicians spread over all parties, but this situation is unstable in winner-take-all systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean-François Laslier & Bilge Ozturk Goktuna, 2016. "Opportunist politicians and the evolution of electoral competition," PSE - Labex "OSE-Ouvrir la Science Economique" halshs-01310250, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:pseose:halshs-01310250
    DOI: 10.1007/s00191-016-0444-x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Persson, Torsten & Tabellini, Guido, 1999. "Political economics and macroeconomic policy," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & M. Woodford (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 22, pages 1397-1482, Elsevier.
    2. Alesina, Alberto & Spear, Stephen E., 1988. "An overlapping generations model of electoral competition," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(3), pages 359-379, December.
    3. Wittman, Donald, 1983. "Candidate Motivation: A Synthesis of Alternative Theories," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 77(1), pages 142-157, March.
    4. Laslier, Jean-Francois & Topol, Richard & Walliser, Bernard, 2001. "A Behavioral Learning Process in Games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 340-366, November.
    5. Powell, G. Bingham, 2006. "Election Laws and Representative Governments: Beyond Votes and Seats," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 36(2), pages 291-315, April.
    6. Scott W. Desposato, 2006. "Parties for Rent? Ambition, Ideology, and Party Switching in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 50(1), pages 62-80, January.
    7. Schlag, Karl H., 1998. "Why Imitate, and If So, How?, : A Boundedly Rational Approach to Multi-armed Bandits," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 78(1), pages 130-156, January.
    8. Laver, Michael, 2005. "Policy and the Dynamics of Political Competition," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 99(2), pages 263-281, May.
    9. John E. Roemer, 1999. "The Democratic Political Economy of Progressive Income Taxation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 67(1), pages 1-20, January.
    10. Michael Laver & Kenneth Benoit, 2003. "The Evolution of Party Systems between Elections," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 47(2), pages 215-233, April.
    11. David Stadelmann & Marco Portmann & Reiner Eichenberger, 2012. "Preference Representation and the Influence of Political Parties in Majoritarian vs. Proportional Systems: An Almost Ideal Empirical Test," CREMA Working Paper Series 2012-03, Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA).
    12. Borgers, Tilman & Sarin, Rajiv, 1997. "Learning Through Reinforcement and Replicator Dynamics," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 77(1), pages 1-14, November.
    13. Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti & Roberto Perotti & Massimo Rostagno, 2002. "Electoral Systems and Public Spending," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(2), pages 609-657.
    14. Michels, Robert, 1915. "Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy," History of Economic Thought Books, McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, number michels1915.
    15. Myerson Roger B., 1993. "Effectiveness of Electoral Systems for Reducing Government Corruption: A Game-Theoretic Analysis," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 118-132, January.
    16. Ingemar Hansson & Charles Stuart, 1984. "Voting competitions with interested politicians: Platforms do not converge to the preferences of the median voter," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 44(3), pages 431-441, January.
    17. Carol Mershon & Olga Shvetsova, 2014. "Change in parliamentary party systems and policy outcomes: Hunting the core," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 26(2), pages 331-351, April.
    18. Scott de Marchi, 1999. "Adaptive Models and Electoral Instability," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 11(3), pages 393-419, July.
    19. Samuelson, Larry & Zhang, Jianbo, 1992. "Evolutionary stability in asymmetric games," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 57(2), pages 363-391, August.
    20. Kollman, Ken & Miller, John H. & Page, Scott E., 1998. "Political Parties and Electoral Landscapes," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 28(1), pages 139-158, January.
    21. Kollman, Ken & Miller, John H. & Page, Scott E., 1992. "Adaptive Parties in Spatial Elections," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 86(4), pages 929-937, December.
    22. Nachbar, J H, 1990. ""Evolutionary" Selection Dynamics in Games: Convergence and Limit Properties," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 19(1), pages 59-89.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Bilge Öztürk Göktuna, 2019. "A dynamic model of party membership and ideologies," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 31(2), pages 209-243, April.
    2. Jonathan Newton, 2018. "Evolutionary Game Theory: A Renaissance," Games, MDPI, vol. 9(2), pages 1-67, May.
    3. Antonio Cabrales & Giovanni Ponti, 2000. "Implementation, Elimination of Weakly Dominated Strategies and Evolutionary Dynamics," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 3(2), pages 247-282, April.
    4. Squintani, Francesco & Valimaki, Juuso, 2002. "Imitation and Experimentation in Changing Contests," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 104(2), pages 376-404, June.
    5. Balkenborg, Dieter & Schlag, Karl H., 2007. "On the evolutionary selection of sets of Nash equilibria," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 133(1), pages 295-315, March.
    6. Forand, Jean Guillaume, 2014. "Two-party competition with persistent policies," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 152(C), pages 64-91.
    7. Weibull, Jörgen W., 1997. "What have we learned from Evolutionary Game Theory so far?," Working Paper Series 487, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, revised 26 Oct 1998.
    8. repec:cdl:ucsbec:6-98 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Reinoud Joosten, 2009. "Paul Samuelson's critique and equilibrium concepts in evolutionary game theory," Papers on Economics and Evolution 2009-16, Philipps University Marburg, Department of Geography.
    10. Ponti, Giovanni, 2000. "Cycles of Learning in the Centipede Game," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 30(1), pages 115-141, January.
    11. Waters, George A., 2009. "Chaos in the cobweb model with a new learning dynamic," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 33(6), pages 1201-1216, June.
    12. Hopkins, Ed, 1999. "Learning, Matching, and Aggregation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 26(1), pages 79-110, January.
    13. Sandholm,W.H., 2003. "Excess payoff dynamics, potential dynamics, and stable games," Working papers 5, Wisconsin Madison - Social Systems.
    14. Demichelis, Stefano & Ritzberger, Klaus, 2003. "From evolutionary to strategic stability," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 113(1), pages 51-75, November.
    15. Michel Schilperoord & Jan Rotmans & Noam Bergman, 2008. "Modelling societal transitions with agent transformation," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 14(4), pages 283-301, December.
    16. Ponti, Giovanni, 2000. "Continuous-time evolutionary dynamics: theory and practice," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 187-214, June.
    17. George Loginov, 2022. "Ordinal imitative dynamics," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 51(2), pages 391-412, June.
    18. Gerard van der Laan & A.F. Tieman, 1996. "Evolutionary Game Theory and the Modelling of Economic Behavior," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 96-172/8, Tinbergen Institute.
    19. Weibull, Jorgen W., 1998. "Evolution, rationality and equilibrium in games," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(3-5), pages 641-649, May.
    20. Braendle, Thomas, 2013. "Do Institutions Affect Citizens' Selection into Politics?," Working papers 2013/04, Faculty of Business and Economics - University of Basel.
    21. Alanyali, Murat, 2010. "A note on adjusted replicator dynamics in iterated games," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 46(1), pages 86-98, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Political dynamics; Party composition; Opportunism;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C73 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    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:hal:pseose:halshs-01310250. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.