This paper assesses the influence of the electoral threat of third parties on major-party roll call voting in the US House. Although low-dimensionality of voting is a feature of strong two-party politics, which describes the contemporary era, there is significant variation across members. I...

For a given distribution of voter ideal points, candidates may compete, not only by changing their policy platforms, but also by seeking to persuade voters to place more weight on one of the given dimensions. We do not examine persuasion mechanisms, per se, but, rather, investigate how change of...

Down’s spatial theory of elections (1957) has occupied a prominent theoretical status within political science. Studies use a notion of ideological distance to develop explanations for observable electoral trends. In elections, voters by observing party ideologies and using the...

Competition between political parties is a process that unfolds over time whereas formal theories of party competition have tended to take an essentially static, or one-shot, approach. This leaves some gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of campaigning. The aim of this paper is to make up...

The objective of this paper is to provide a political economy explanation of the empirically observed negative correlation between employment protection and insurance. We study an economy composed of four groups of agents (capitalists, unemployed people, low- and high-skilled workers), each one...

This paper proposes a simple model of political supporters in an environment of spatial political competition. We assume that supporters are driven by sympathy for a candidate with similar preferences on their side of the policy space and by fear of a candidate with different preferences on the...