Electoral competition with costly policy changes: A dynamic perspective

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gersbach, Hans; Jackson, Matthew O.; Muller, Philippe; Tejada, Oriol
• 署名单位: Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich; Stanford University; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich; University of Barcelona
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2023.105716
• 发表日期: 2023
• 关键词: Elections; Costs of change; political polarization; Markov perfect equilibrium

摘要

We analyze two-party electoral competition with a one-dimensional policy space, costly policy changes, and random negative shocks to a party's viability over an infinite horizon. We show the existence and uniqueness of stationary Markov perfect equilibria in which parties use so-called simple strategies. Regard-less of the initial policy, party choices converge in the long run to a stochastic alternation between two policies, with transitions occurring if and only if parties suffer a negative shock to their viability. Although costs of change have a moderating effect on policies, full convergence to the median voter position does not take place when parties are polarized.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons .org/licenses/by-nc /4 .0/).