Since individuals demanding formations of new parties face a collective action problem, I inquire why people form new parties, and why this political strategy became increasingly popular between 1973 and 2002 in Swedish municipalities. Case-studies indicate that ‘strong emotions’ – i.e....

This paper studies the effects of endogenous party formation on political platforms. It develops a model in which parties allow like-minded citizens to, first, share the cost of running in a public election and, second, coordinate on a policy platform. The paper characterizes the set of...

This paper studies the effects of endogenous party formation on political platforms. It develops a model in which parties allow like-minded citizens to, first, share the cost of running in a public election and, second, coordinate on a policy platform. The paper characterizes the set of...

The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social...

Some policy problems pit the interests of one group against those of another group. One group may, for example, determine the provision of a project (such as a power plant or a dam) that benefits group members but has downstream externalities that hurt people outside the group. We introduce a...

We study a game theoretic model of a parliamentary democracy under proportional representation where `citizen candidates' 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 the rents from...

This paper provides a game-theoretic model of representative democracy with endogenous party formation. Coalition formation may occur before and after elections, and the expected payoffs from the after-election majority game affect incentives to form parties before the elections. In this way...

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...

We study the implications of economies of party size in a model of party formation. We show that when the policy space is one-dimensional, candidates form at most two parties. This result does not depend on the magnitude of the economies of party size or sensitively on the nature of the...