We study classist societies where the middle class fight over redistribution of public funds with the marginalized and over social policies with the elites. We show that such societies are often deprived of well-defined majoritarian preferences, underscoring the importance of the party system....

In an election over two policies, public mood swings whereby voters move ideologically towards a particular policy should never hurt its electoral performance. We find that this fundamental monotonicity property of preference aggregation cannot be guaranteed in the presence of a commercial...