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DFG Graduate Program Collective Decision-Making

Photo: Pixabay/Geralt

Research

P4: Electoral competition

In politics collective outcomes arise from the interaction of individual voters and parties under various institutional arrangements. Core determinants of collective outcomes are the decisions of parties to enter and exit the political arena, their changes of location within this arena, as well as voters’ responses to these changes in the political market.

This project is rooted in public choice theory. It will focus on building economic models of electoral competition based on empirical knowledge from party and voter research, while at the same time providing additional theoretical foundation to the empirical work done in political science.

Objectives

  • To explore how the distribution of voter bliss points affect collective outcomes.
  • To study the effect of preference externalities.
  • To investigate a two-dimensional model of electoral competition.

Suggested Readings

Bolleyer, N. (2013): New Parties in Old Party Systems: Persistence and Decline in Seventeen Democracies, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Callander, S. (2005): “Electoral Competition in Heterogeneous Districts," Journal of Political Economy, 113, 1116-1144.

Conti, N., Hutter, S. and K. Nanou (2018): “Party competition and political representation in crisis,” Party Politics, 24, 3-9.

Downs, A. (1957): An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York: Harper and Row.

Franzese, R. (2002): “Electoral and Partisan Cycles in Economic Policies and Outcomes,” Annual Review of Political Science, 5, 369-421.

George, L., and J. Waldfogel (2003): "Who Affects Whom in Daily Newspaper Markets?," Journal of Political Economy, 111, 765-784.

Irmen, A. and J.-F. Thisse (1998): "Competition in Multi-Characteristics Spaces: Hotelling was Almost Right," Journal of Economic Theory, 78, 76-102.

Loertscher, L. and G. Muehlheusser (2011): “Sequential Location Games,” RAND Journal of Economics, 42, 639-663.

Plümper, T. and C. Martin (2008): “Multi-party competition: A computational model with abstention and memory,” Electoral Studies, 27, 424-441.