The citizen-candidate approach, proposed to study the performance of representative democracies, builds on a multi-stage game where the same agents are asked whether or not to become a candidate and, successively, to vote. Consistently, the solution concept adopted in Besley and Coate (1997)...

We prove that for generic plurality games with positive cost of voting, the number of Nash equilibria is finite. Furthermore all the equilibria are regular, hence stable sets as singletons.

We study the strategic behavior of voters in a model of proportional representation, in which the policy space is multidimensional. Our main finding is that in large electorate, under some assumptions on voters' preferences, voters essentially vote, in any equilibrium, only for the extreme parties.

Most of the voting models restrict themselves to the analysis of symmetric equilibria, i.e. equilibria in which "similar" voters make "similar" voting decisions. In this paper we investigate this assumption under costly plurality voting. In any pure strategy equilibrium, if two active voters...

We study a model of proportional representation, in which the policy space is multidimensional. We first show, via an example, that the assumption of quasi-concavity of the utility function is not sufficient to obtain the result that only the extreme parties get votes, contrary to the...

In a recent paper Osborne, Rosenthal and Turner (2000) investigate a model of meetings with costly participation. Their main result is that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are extreme. In particular, when the policy space is one-dimensional and the policy...

We prove that for generic plurality games with positive cost of voting, the number of Nash equilibria is finite. Furthermore all the equilibria are regular, hence stable sets as singletons.

We consider a model where policy motivated citizens vote in two simultane- ous elections, one for the President who is elected by majority rule, in a single national district, and one for the Congressmen, each of whom is elected by ma- jority rule in a local district. The policy to be...

In this paper we propose a model in which there are ideological and strate- gic voters who vote under poportional rule. We prove that the behavior of ideological voters matters for the determination of the outcome. We show that a subset of strategic voters partially counteracts the votes of the...