IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/carnds/_003.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Policy Position-Taking in Two-Party Elections

Author

Listed:
  • Ken Kollman

    (University of Michigan, v1: Institute for Social Research, v0: Political Science)

  • John H. Miller

    (Carnegie Mellon University, Social and Decision Sciences)

  • Scott E. Page

    (California Institute of Technology, Division of Humanities and Social Sciences)

Abstract

We present a model of two-party competition that relates the distribution of voters' preferences to the formation of the electoral landscape upon which parties choose issue positions. The two parties in the model tend to converge to similar positions on some issues and diverge on other issues, depending on how voters' assign weights, or strengths, to policy dimensions. In particular, the more weight voters' assign to policy dimensions on which they have extreme preferences, the more parties will separate on the policy. Predictions from the model are tested with data from presidential elections in the United States, and various tests offer robust support for the model.

Suggested Citation

  • Ken Kollman & John H. Miller & Scott E. Page, 1995. "Policy Position-Taking in Two-Party Elections," Papers _003, Carnegie Mellon, Department of Decision Sciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:wop:carnds:_003
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: ftp://zia.hss.cmu.edu/pub/miller/kmp3.ps
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    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:wop:carnds:_003. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dsdcmus.html .

    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.