On the benefits of party competition

Bernhardt, Dan; Campuzano, Larissa; Squintani, Francesco; Câmara, Odilon

doi:10.1016/j.geb.2008.10.007

Cited by 23 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A sampling includes Barro (1973), Ferejohn (1986), Rogoff and Sibert (1988), Austen‐Smith and Banks (1989), Rogoff (1990), Banks and Sundaram (1993, 1998), Harrington (1993), Persson, Roland, and Tabellini (1997), Fearon (1999), Berganza (2000), Le Borgne and Lockwood (2001, 2006), Smart and Sturm (2003, 2007), Hindriks and Belleflamme (2005), Hatfield and Padró i Miquel (2006), Besley (2006), and Besley and Smart (2007). Exceptions are Bernhardt et al (2009), Campuzano (2005), and Meirowitz (2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

Snyder

Ting

2011

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We develop a model of intraparty candidate selection under partisan electoral competition and voter uncertainty. Candidates for office belong to parties, which are factions of ideologically similar candidates. Each party's candidate for a general election can be selected either by a "centralized" mechanism that effectively randomizes over possible candidates or by voters in a primary election. The electorate cares about ideology and valence, and both primary and general elections may reveal candidate valences. Our main theoretical result is that while primaries raise the expected quality of a party's candidates, they may hurt the ex ante preferred party in a competitive electorate by increasing the chances of revealing the opposing party's candidates as superior. Thus, primaries are adopted in relatively extreme districts where a clear favorite party exists. An empirical analysis of the adoption of direct primaries and the competitiveness of primary elections across U.S. states supports these predictions.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

Snyder

Ting

2011

American J Political Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The existence of simple equilibria is proved, and it is shown that in all such equilibria, the median voter is decisive: a policy choice by an officeholder secures re-election if and only if it gives the median voter a payoff at least equal to the median's expected payoff from electing a challenger. This model has been extended to allow for term limits (Bernhardt et al 2004), for parties (Bernhardt et al 2005, Campuzano 2005, and for costly signaling in campaigns (Kang 2005).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Dynamic Model of Democratic Elections in Multidimensional Policy Spaces

Banks

Duggan

2008

QJPS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We propose a general model of repeated elections. In each period, a challenger is chosen from the electorate to run against an incumbent politician in a majority-rule election, and the winner then selects a policy from a multidimensional policy space. Individual policy preferences are private information, whereas policy choices are publicly observable. We prove existence and continuity of equilibria in "simple" voting and policy strategies; we provide examples to show the variety of possible equilibrium patterns in multiple dimensions; we analyze the effects of patience and office-holding benefits on the persistence of policies over time; and we identify relationships between equilibrium policies and the core of the underlying voting game. As a byproduct of our analysis, we show how equilibrium incentives may lead elected representatives to make policy compromises, even when binding commitments are unavailable. We provide an informational story for incumbency * This paper was presented under the title "A Multidimensional Model of Repeated Elections" in seminars at Columbia, Cornell, MIT, NYU, and Yale, at the

show abstract

“…characteristics. On top of that, unlike some of the previous political agency models, we do not need to consider different settings depending on whether or not the politician's characteristics are common knowledge or private knowledge (Bernhardt et al (2009) Previous literature has also looked at the role of commitment in elections. With commitment, the politician chooses the decisions that he will take while in office at the beginning of his term.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Private agenda and re-election incentives

Rivas

2015

Soc Choice Welf

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Consider a politician who has to take two sequential decisions during his term in office.For each decision, the politician faces a trade-off between taking what he believes to be the decision that generates a public benefit, thus increasing his chances of re-election, and taking the decision that increases his private gain but is likely to decrease his chances of re-election. In our results we find that if the politician is a good enough decision maker and he desires to be re-elected enough, he takes the action that generates a public benefit regardless of his private interests. Moreover, we find that the behavior such that the politician delays taking the action that generates a public benefit to the last period of his term in office before he is up for re-election is optimal if and only if he has either very high or very low decision making skills.JEL Classification: D72, D81.

show abstract

On the benefits of party competition

Cited by 23 publications

References 14 publications

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

Electoral Selection with Parties and Primaries

A Dynamic Model of Democratic Elections in Multidimensional Policy Spaces

Private agenda and re-election incentives

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About