Note: Italicized states are those that were Republican in 1960. Boldfaced states are those that were Democratic in 1960. χ 2 = 24.91 with 3 df (p < .005); r 2 = .55. a Although Kennedy outpolled Nixon in Mississippi (31% to 25%), a plurality voted for electors who cast their electoral votes for segregationist Harry Byrd.

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Abstract. Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on a 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.

Formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution. This paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence. Valence can be interpreted as the non-policy basis of political judgement made by the electorate concerning the quality of political contenders. The theorem presented here shows that there is a necessary condition for convergence. The condition involves the difference in party valences and the electoral variance. When the condition fails, the low-valence parties will be forced to adopt policy positions far from the electoral centre. The inference appears to be substantiated by an empirical model of the Israel election in 1996. Copyright 2007 The Review of Economic Studies Limited.