A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last...

We survey critically the brief history of modeling party competition in general elections, beginning with the Hotelling-Downs model with a unidimensional policy space, and the Wittman model with endogenous parties, to the multi-dimensional citizen-candidate and PUNE models. Some applications of...

We consider the voting-with-absenteeism game of Quint-Shubik (2003). In that paper we defined a power index for such games, called the absentee index. Our analysis was based on the theory of the Shapley-Shubik power index (SSPI) for simple games. In this paper we do an analogous analysis, based...

In a citizen candidate equilibrium, there are n candidates each of whom announces a policy in a policy space of dimension d. Thus the policy equilibrium lives in a space of dimension nd. We show, in a canonical example, that the equilibrium manifold is generically of dimension nd. In particular,...

A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last...

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a...

We assume that people have a need to make statements, and construct a model in which this need is the sole determinant of voting behavior. In this model, an individual selects a ballot that makes as close a statement as possible to her ideal point, where abstaining from voting is a possible...

Three vote-share equations are estimated and analyzed in this paper, one for presidential elections, one for on-term House elections, and one for mid-term House elections. The sample period is 1916-2006. Considering the three equations together allows one to test whether the same economic...

We construct an equilibrium model of party competition, in which parties are especially concerned with their core and swing voters, concerns which American political scientists have focused upon in their attempts to understand party behavior in general elections. Parties compete on a large...