A model of political equilibrium in a representative democracy

Abstract This paper studies political equilibrium in a two-party representative democracy in which the political parties are policy motivated and voters trade off their policy preferences against their ‘party identity’. It is shown that the parties will in general adopt differing policy positions in equilibrium, and that, under certain qualifications, the winning policy will lie between the more popular party's preferred policy and a certain utilitarian optimum. The winning policy will be closer to this utilitarian optimum the less biased the electorate is in terms of ‘party identification’.

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