The Political Economy of Xenophobia and Distribution: The Case of Denmark

For the first time in many years, a conservative government came to power in Denmark in 2001, due primarily to the citizenry's dissatisfaction with social-democratic policies on immigartion. We represent political competition in denmark as taking place on two issues -- the size of the public sector and immigration -- and model political equilibrium using the party-unanimity- Nash-equilibrium concept (PUNE), which generates equilibria on multi-dimensional policy spaces where parties form endogenously. By fitting the model to Danish data, we argue that citizen xenophobia may be expected to decrease the size of the Danish public sector by an amount equal to one-half of a standard deviation of the probability distribution of citizens' views as to what the optimal size of public sector is.