A spatial voting model where proportional rule leads to two-party equilibria

Sinopoli, Francesco De; Iannantuoni, Giovanna

doi:10.1007/s00182-006-0056-z

Cited by 46 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Additionally, polarization may have a strong negative effect on economic performance and growth (Frye ) and increase the risk of social tension and violent conflict within and between nation‐states (Esteban and Schneider ). Among several alternative theories proposed, one can attribute polarization to a wide range of forces spanning from informational or media‐related factors (e.g., DellaVigna and Kaplan ; Grosser and Palfrey ) to candidates' differing policy preferences (e.g., Calvert ; Roemer ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Electoral Rule Disproportionality and Platform Polarization

Matakos

Troumpounis

Xefteris

2015

American J Political Sci

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Despite common perception, existing theoretical literature lacks a complete formal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization. In this article, we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard Downsian electoral competition setup with mainly, but not necessarily purely, policy-motivated parties. We first show that in equilibrium, platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality. We then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms. This effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used Dalton index. Constructing a data set covering more than 300 elections, our main theoretical findings are empirically supported, pointing toward the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization.

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confidence: 99%

Electoral Rule Disproportionality and Platform Polarization

Matakos

Troumpounis

Xefteris

2015

American J Political Sci

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“…9 9 The mean decision rule is also analyzed in other contexts, such as, Gibbons (1988) and De Sinopoli and Iannantuoni (2000). …”

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confidence: 99%

Costly participation and heterogeneous preferences in informational committees

Cai

2009

The RAND J of Economics

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Informational committees are groups of people who are designated to gather information. This article develops a simple model of committee size based on costly participation and preference heterogeneity. In a setting in which the information structure and policy preferences are both represented by normal random variables, I characterize an equilibrium under the mean decision rule and derive the optimal committee size. I show that when effort costs are sufficiently high, preference heterogeneity can provide members additional incentives to gather information, and thus the optimal committee size and the principal's expected payoff can increase in the heterogeneity of committee members' policy preferences. Copyright (c) 2009, RAND.

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“…h(t) = (E X j [X j ] + t)/2) and the normalization of the distribution. To obtain the second property, preferences is normally the median voter's preferred decision (see the literature following Black, 1948), whereas the average aggregation rule resembles proportional representation (Ortuño-Ortín, 1997;De Sinopoli and Iannantuoni, 2007). Example 2: joint responsibility versus individual responsibility.…”

Section: Appendix a Auxiliary Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The average aggregation rule with the optimal report space in my setting can be interpreted as optimal delegation in the sense of Holmström (1984). The average aggregation rule in combination with a given non-optimal report space is studied in a number of articles (e.g., Rausser et al, 2015;De Sinopoli and Iannantuoni, 2007;Renault andTrannoy, 2005 andCai, 2009). 10 Holmström (1984) poses the delegation problem and discusses optimal interval delegation in some examples.…”

Section: The Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%