IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hrv/faseco/34222831.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Theory of Divided Government

Author

Listed:
  • Alesina, Alberto Francesco
  • Rosenthal, Howard

Abstract

This paper extends the spatial theory of voting to the case in which policy choices depend upon the interaction between executive and the legislature. Voters are strategic and to analyze equilibrium the authors apply 'coalition proof' type refinements. The model has implications consistent with voting behavior in the United States: (1) split-ticket with some voters choosing one party for the presidency and the other for Congress; (2) for some parameter values, a divided government with different parties controlling the executive and the majority of the legislature; and (3) the mid-term electoral cycle with the party holding the presidency always losing votes in mid-term legislative elections.

Suggested Citation

  • Alesina, Alberto Francesco & Rosenthal, Howard, 1996. "A Theory of Divided Government," Scholarly Articles 34222831, Harvard University Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hrv:faseco:34222831
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/34222831/2171833.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ordeshook,Peter C., 1986. "Game Theory and Political Theory," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521315937, September.
    2. Greenberg, Joseph, 1989. "Deriving strong and coalition-proof nash equilibria from an abstract system," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 195-202, October.
    3. Melvin Hinich & Peter Ordeshook, 1969. "Abstentions and equilibrium in the electoral process," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 7(1), pages 81-106, September.
    4. Rosenthal, Howard & Sen, Subrata, 1973. "Electoral Participation in the French Fifth Republic," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 67(1), pages 29-54, March.
    5. Calvert, Randall L. & Ferejohn, John A., 1983. "Coattail Voting in Recent Presidential Elections," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 77(2), pages 407-419, June.
    6. Kenneth Shepsle, 1986. "The positive theory of legislative institutions: an enrichment of social choice and spatial models," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 50(1), pages 135-178, January.
    7. Greenberg, Joseph & Shepsle, Kenneth, 1987. "The Effect of Electoral Rewards in Multiparty Competition with Entry," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 81(2), pages 525-537, June.
    8. Alesina, Alberto, 1988. "Credibility and Policy Convergence in a Two-Party System with Rational Voters," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 78(4), pages 796-805, September.
    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. Alesina, A. & Rosenthal, H., 1989. "Moderating Elections," Working papers 537, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
    2. Hortala-Vallve, Rafael & Esteve-Volart, Berta, 2011. "Voter turnout and electoral competition in a multidimensional policy space," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 376-384, June.
    3. Martin J. Osborne & Al Slivinski, 1996. "A Model of Political Competition with Citizen-Candidates," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(1), pages 65-96.
    4. Alesina, Alberto & Londregan, John & Rosenthal, Howard, 1993. "A Model of the Political Economy of the United States," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 87(1), pages 12-33, March.
    5. Heidhues, Paul & Lagerlof, Johan, 2003. "Hiding information in electoral competition," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 42(1), pages 48-74, January.
    6. Keith T. Poole & Howard Rosenthal, 1994. "Congress and Railroad Regulation: 1874 to 1887," NBER Chapters, in: The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, pages 81-120, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Persson, Torsten & Tabellini, Guido, 2002. "Political economics and public finance," Handbook of Public Economics, in: A. J. Auerbach & M. Feldstein (ed.), Handbook of Public Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 24, pages 1549-1659, Elsevier.
    8. Micael Castanheira, 2003. "Why Vote For Losers?," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 1(5), pages 1207-1238, September.
    9. Peter J. Coughlin, 2015. "Probabilistic voting in models of electoral competition," Chapters, in: Jac C. Heckelman & Nicholas R. Miller (ed.), Handbook of Social Choice and Voting, chapter 13, pages 218-234, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    10. Donald Wittman, 1984. "Multi-candidate equilibria," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 43(3), pages 287-291, January.
    11. Silvia Dominguez-Martinez & Otto Swank, 2006. "Polarization, Information Collection and Electoral Control," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 26(3), pages 527-545, June.
    12. Brusco, Sandro & Roy, Jaideep, 2016. "Cycles in public opinion and the dynamics of stable party systems," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 413-430.
    13. Hans Gersbach & Philippe Muller & Oriol Tejada, 2017. "A Dynamic Model of Electoral Competition with Costly Policy Changes," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 17/270, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
    14. Aggeborn, Linuz & Persson, Lovisa, 2017. "Public Finance and Right-Wing Populism," Working Paper Series 1182, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    15. Chan, Jimmy & Suen, Wing, 2009. "Media as watchdogs: The role of news media in electoral competition," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(7), pages 799-814, October.
    16. Pablo T. Spiller, 2003. "The Institutional Foundations of Public Policy: A Transactions Approach with Application to Argentina," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 19(2), pages 281-306, October.
    17. Allison, Blake A. & Bagh, Adib & Lepore, Jason J., 2018. "Sufficient conditions for weak reciprocal upper semi-continuity in mixed extensions of games," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 99-107.
    18. Mauricio Cárdenas Santa María & Zeinab Partow, 1998. "Oil, coffee and the dynamic commons problems in Colombia," Working Papers Series. Documentos de Trabajo 9206, Fedesarrollo.
    19. Gersbach, Hans & Jackson, Matthew O. & Muller, Philippe & Tejada, Oriol, 2023. "Electoral competition with costly policy changes: A dynamic perspective," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 214(C).
    20. Jason Matthew DeBacker, 2015. "Flip‐Flopping: Ideological Adjustment Costs In The United States Senate," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 53(1), pages 108-128, January.

    More about this item

    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:hrv:faseco:34222831. 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: Office for Scholarly Communication (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deharus.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.