Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/57490 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
Preprints of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods No. 2011,25
Publisher: 
Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Abstract: 
A robust feature of models of electoral competition between two opportunistic, purely office-motivated parties is that both parties become indistinguishable in equilibrium. I this short note, I show that this strong connection between the office motivation of parties and their equilibrium choice of identical platforms depends on the following two - possibly counterfactual - assumptions: 1. Issue spaces are uni-dimensional and 2. Parties are unitary actors whose preferences can be represented by expected utility functions. The main goal here is to provide an example of a two-party model in which parties offer substantially different platforms in equilibrium even though no exogenous asymmetries are assumed. In this example, some voters' preferences over the 2-dimensional issue space are assumed to exhibit non-convexities and parties evaluate their actions with respect to a set of beliefs on the electorate.
Subjects: 
Downs Model
Games with Incomplete Preferences
Platform Divergence
Knightian Uncertainty
Uncertainty Aversion.
JEL: 
C79
D72
D81
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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