Following Axelrod's tournaments for strategies in the repeat-play prisoner's dilemma, we ran a ``tournament of party decision rules'' in a dynamic agent-based model of party competition. We asked researchers to submit rules for selecting party positions in a two-dimensional policy space, pitting...

This paper examines the role of coalition formation in the empirically observed negative correlation between employment protection and unemployment benefit. We study an economy composed of four groups of agents (capitalists, unemployed people, low- and high-skilled workers), each one represented...

Which combinations of values and perceptions constitute the arguments in the debate on European integration? Using survey data from Norway's 1994 EU referendum, this article explores Norwegian voters' support for these arguments. Thus, the article highlights the perceptions and arguments of the...

The article develops a theoretical framework for the analysis of the conditions which affect the creation of barriers to entry into political systems. Its main argument is that parties in power increase structural barriers to enhance their interests when they perceive a threat to their own...

Formal theory has often been criticized for shying away from empirical testing, which brought some to wonder about its empirical relevance altogether. Theorists, on their side, often responded by accusing much of the empirical work in political science as being devoid of any theoretical...

Although there are well-developed theories of two-party competition in a one-dimensional policy space, it has proven extremely difficult to construct a model of multi-party competition (with three or more parties) in two or more dimensions. One difficulty with developing such a model is due to...

A proper understanding of party system change demands a dynamic theory of party competition. This should integrate accounts of competition in the legislative party system, in particular coalition formation, with accounts of competition in the electoral party system, in particular vote...

We analyze a model of a dynamic political competition between two policy-motivated parties under uncertainty. The model suggests that electoral mandates matter: increasing the margin of victory in the previous election causes both parties to shift towards policies preferred by the winner, and...

Starting from a review of models of positional and valence issues, the paper – by tapping into the original definition of valence issue – introduces a classification of issues based on their level of overall, dychotomic agreement. This allows the placement of both positional and valence...