This article has been presented at the Third CORE Summer School on Heterogeneity and at the WZB (Berlin), the University of Massachusets at Amherst and at the Harvard-MIT Seminar in Positive Political Economy. We thank participants, A. Dixit, J. Roemer, K. Shepsle, J. Snyder and S. Weber for their suggestions. We also express our appreciation to Leonardo Felli and two anonymous referees for useful comments and objections. All errors and shortcomings are ours.
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Party Formation and Minority Ideological Positions†
Article first published online: 17 JUL 2009
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02285.x
© The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2009
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How to Cite
Anesi, V. and Donder, P. D. (2009), Party Formation and Minority Ideological Positions. The Economic Journal, 119: 1303–1323. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0297.2009.02285.x
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Publication History
- Issue published online: 4 SEP 2009
- Article first published online: 17 JUL 2009
- Submitted: 26 June 2007 Accepted: 8 October 2008
- Abstract
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We develop a model where voters differ in their exogenous income and in their ideological views, with racism as an illustration. Electoral competition takes place between an endogenous number of parties which propose platforms consisting of both an ideological and an economic dimension. Our objective is to explain the emergence of minority ideological positions and to understand the role played by political parties in this emergence. We first show that, in a pure citizen-candidate model where parties are absent, the only equilibrium consists of the majority ideological position. We then show that allowance for the formation of political parties generates equilibria with minority ideological positions.