Political compromise: platforms and policies

• Humberto Llavador ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Pompeu Fabra

     Universitat Pompeu Fabra

     Barcelona, España

     
• Localización: Working Papers: Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials, ISSN-e 1133-8962, Nº. 193, 2001
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • It is frequently believed, and empirically observed, that the outcome of an election determines government action to at least some extent. However, the standard two-party spatial model of political competition trivializes any post-electoral policy-making process by assuming that the party that obtains more than fifty percent of the vote adopts the policy announced during the electoral campaign. Its best known implication is that, under an environment of perfect information, both candidates announce the same policy, which coincides with the policy preferred by the median voter.

    In this paper, we enrich the theoretical framework of party competition to allow for a non-trivial policy-setting process and for sophisticated voters who care not only about the policy implemented but also about the platform they support with their vote. First, we show that platform convergence is a non-robust feature created by the winner-takes-all assumption. The lightest influence of the opposition in the policy-making process provokes a divergent tendency in platform writing. Without abstention, an equilibrium is characterized by polarized platforms and a moderate implemented policy that consistently differs from the median voter ideal policy. When abstention is introduced into the analysis, parties announce differentiated yet non-extreme policies, voters concentrate around the platforms, and substantial turnout rates are generically obtained where abstention occurs among voters with extreme views as well as with moderate views.