This paper presents a model that reconciles Downsian voting models that assume parties move to the middle, with the political party literature that shows parties as offering distinctly different positions and remaining more extreme than most voters. It argues that in single district plurality...

We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where ideologically motivated citizen groups form parties, voting occurs and governments are formed. We study the coalition governments that emerge as functions of the parties' seat shares, the size of...

There are multiple models of party formation in the political economy literature. However, most of these works consider individuals as parties and do not model parties as a group of candidates. In this paper, we follow the latter approach and assume that parties form as a result of mutually...