Follow the Leader: Theory and Evidence on Political Participation: A Comment

In a very influential paper, Shachar and Nalebuff (1999) develop and estimate structurally a pivotal-leader model of political participation, focusing on the first-order condition of the problem solved by the leaders of two political parties. This note (1) shows that the problem of the party leaders is not necessarily concave, (2) provides conditions for concavity, and (3) attempts to verify whether these conditions hold for the parameter values estimated by Shachar and Nalebuff.