Spatial models of political competition with endogenous political parties

Abstract

Two important human action selection processes are the choice by citizens of parties to support in elections and the choice by party leaders of policy 'packages' offered to citizens in order to attract this support. Having reviewed approaches analysing these choices and the reasons for doing this using the methodology of agent-based modelling, we extend a recent agent-based model of party competition to treat the number and identity of political parties as an output of, rather than an input to, the process of party competition. Party birth is modelled as an endogenous change of agent type from citizen to party leader, which requires describing citizen dissatisfaction with the history of the system. Endogenous birth and death of parties transforms into a dynamic system even in an environment where all agents have otherwise non-responsive adaptive rules. A key parameter is the survival threshold, with lower thresholds leaving citizens on average less dissatisfied. Paradoxically, the adaptive rule most successful for party leaders in winning votes makes citizens on average less happy than under other policy-selection rules.

Political Spaces, Dimensionality Decline and Party Competition

“…We assume that voters' preferences and political parties' positions are similar in terms of dimensionality. Several studies analyze political processes in the presence of a stable criterion (i.e., a constant evaluation function) for party policy assessment [29,[32][33][34]. However, such a criterion determining whether or not to adhere to a political party may change over time.…”

“…In such a space, a political party selects a position that takes into account the relevant political issues in order to attract voters [29,[32][33][34]42]. In other words, the location of a political party in a n-dimensional issue space represents its political stance on every political issue.…”

Monte Carlo Analysis in Academic Research

“…Love it, or hate it (Binmore, 1994), the simulations of the Prisoner's Dilemma in the last three decades outweigh any other topic, and by a considerable margin (see Hoffmann, 2000;Axelrod & D'Ambrosio, 1996;Gotts et al, 2003). Public opinion dynamics (to cite just a few, (Nowak et al, 1990;Latane, 1996;Huckfeldt et al, 2004)) or competitive position taking by political parties Kollman et al, 1992Kollman et al, , 1998de Marchi, 1999;Laver, 2005;Laver & Schilperoord, 2007;Fowler & Laver, 2008 have also received a considerable amount of attention.…”

Party Competition: An Agent-Based Model

“…We move beyond this in Chapter 4, defining a model of endogenous party "birth" and "death" (Laver et al 2010;Laver and Schilperoord 2007) that has the implication that the set of surviving political parties is endogenous to the system of party competition. We now also model competition between party leaders using different decision rules, extending work on this using computer "tournaments" (Fowler and Laver 2008).…”