electoral outcomes with probabilistic voting and nash social welfare maxima abstract this paper provides unexpected support to nash s view of how bargaining determines the social choice we first present a spatial model of electoral competition with probabilistic voting and a very close relation between voters preferences and their choice probabilities the outcome of the electoral competition game is then shown to be precisely the social alternative that maximizes a nash type social welfare function theorem 1 this electoral outcome is also interpreted as a unanimity likelihood maximum corollary 1 within our framework existence and uniqueness of such an outcome are guaranteed corollaries 2 and 3

explaining party ideological stances we apply the iterative algorithm by merrill and adams political analysis 9 347 361 2001 to compute the optimal positions of vote maximizing parties along a one dimensional space for a large number of elections this allows us to systematically evaluate factors that push parties toward more centrifugal locations in equilibrium our findings largely corroborate expectations suggested by the theoretical literature albeit with one notable exception the relative size of a partisan constituency reduces rather than enhances the likelihood of a party having an extreme optimal position we then compare derived equilibrium positions with actual party positions with the aim of understanding the nature of electoral incentives and offering insights about party system competition in particular we show that the age of a party the party family to which it belongs post election expectations and internal rules for candidate and leader selection are all factors that increase the probability of a party approaching the position predicted by pure vote maximizing considerations

issue voting as a constrained choice problem prevalent models of issue voting view vote choice as a choice among party policies choice sets are implicitly assumed to be the same for all voters and their composition is left to researchers discretion this article aims to relax such assumptions by presenting a model with a varying probability of inclusion in the choice set we apply the constrained choice conditional logistic regression to survey data from the 1989 parliamentary election in norway to examine the effects of party identification of voters and electoral viability and policy extremity of parties on individual voters choice set compositions further we look into the effect of parties policy positions on their electoral fates under alternative assumptions about the composition of voters choice sets we find that voters choice set composition conditions both the effects of their policy considerations on vote choice and those of parties policy offerings on their electoral fates

why small centrist third parties motivate policy divergence by major parties plurality based elections between two major parties or candidates sometimes feature small cen trist third parties we modify the standard two party spatial model of policy seeking parties to incorporate a centrist third party and we show that the presence of such a party even if it has no chance of winning motivates the major parties to propose policies that are much more divergent than without the third party we derive explicit formulas for party locations at a three party equilibrium and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for existence ofthat equilibrium we show that over time the major parties can be expected to shift their policies in the same direction relative to each other but in the opposite direction relative to the minor party the predictions of this model are compared with estimates of party policy locations during appropriate periods in postwar britain for the past half century a small british party first the liberals now the liberal demo crats has occupied a policy position in between the two major british parties labour and the con servatives during much of the same period the free democrats in germany have held a similar posi tion between the social democrats and the christian democrats in addition recent american presidential elections have featured the candidates john anderson in 1980 and ross perot in 1992 and 1996 who had no realistic chance of winning and who were arguably located between the democratic and republican nom inees 1 what are the policy consequences of the existence of such small centrist parties or candidates on what political institutions do these consequences depend do these consequences benefit the policy aspirations of the centrist party or do they undermine these goals under proportional representation it is well known that a small centrist party such as the free democrats in germany may hold the balance of power bargaining with each of the major players as they attempt to form governing coalitions but in a plurality based system as in britain or the united states the consequences are far

multiparty electoral competition in the netherlands and germany a model based on multinomial probit a typical assumption of electoral models of party competition is that parties adopt policy positions so as to maximize expected vote share here we use euro barometer survey data and european elite study data from 1979 for the netherlands and germany to construct a stochastic model of voter response based on multinomial probit estimation for each of these countries we estimate a pure spatial electoral voting model and a joint spatial model the latter model also includes individual voter and demographic characteristics the pure spatial models for the two countries quite accurately described the electoral response as a stochastic function of party positions we use these models to perform a thought experiment so as to estimate the expected vote maximizing party positions we go on to propose a model of internal party decision making based both on pre election electoral estimation and post election coalition bargaining this model suggests why the various parties in the period in question did not adopt vote maximizing positions we argue that maximizing expected vote will not in general be a rational party strategy in multiparty political systems which are based on proportional representation

an irrational party of rational members the collision of legislators reelection quest with party success in the japan socialist party this study presents a new explanation to a puzzle regarding the reluctance of the japan socialist party jsp to moderate its hard liner marxist platform the author does so by focusing on the pref

a stochastic model of the 2007 russian duma election in this paper we consider the nature of local nash equilibrium lne for a model of the 2007 duma election in russia using estimates of valence obtained from sociodemo graphic variables we then extend this sociodemographic valence model by including institutional valences the approval by voters of the various institutions including the president the prime minister the state duma and the federation council we show by simulation that the vote maximizing lne of this general stochastic model were not at the electoral origin the dominant feature of the election was the influence of approval or disapproval of president putin on each voter s political choice

electoral politics interest groups and the size of government electoral politics interest groups and the size of government i introduction interest groups have been considered main actors in the political drama for some time now by political scientists as in bentley 1908 schattschneider 1935 and truman 1951 and more recently by economist also such as olson 1965 and stigler 1975 despite the widespread consensus on their importance there have been few formal attempts to analyze their impact on public policies thus borooah and van der ploeg 1983 90 were moved to declare that theory based on the importance of different interest groups is badly needed in economics an important exception is becker s 1983 1985 analysis of interest group competition becker draws insights about the nature of the trade offs that occur when interest groups compete for political influence but becker consciously avoids incorporating into his model political institutions such as voting voting rules and candidates 1983 391 4 1985 330 rather he assumes that the political process operates as a veil through which the underlying strengths and demands of various interest groups are revealed this paper takes a different tack but one complementary to becker s approach the analysis is based on an explicit model of the political process that includes interest groups in the model interest group influence is a potential supply of votes for which parties or candidates compete each party seeks a winning coalition of voters and thus engages in implicit logrolling tullock 1959 572 an equilibrium exists in the competition for the support of interest groups and the nature of the equilibrium electoral platforms is identified below embodied in the characterization of the equilibria is a set of parameters that can be said to measure the strengths of the various interest groups and which enable one to identify how candidates change their policy positions in response to a change in the strength of an interest group it is therefore possible to analyze simultaneously the existence of an electoral equilibrium its nature including its normative properties and changes in equilibrium due to shifts in the balance of forces between competing groups 1 in contrast to becker 1983 1985 these analytical features are not assumed outright rather they are based on an underlying model of elections the theoretical underpinnings for this model are discussed in section ii interest groups are often alleged to be responsible in part for recent increases in the size of government in western democracies 2 therefore in sections iii and iv a model of the political process is used to study the impact of an increase in the influence of a particular interest group on government size in the simple models of the public sector considered here increasing group influence per se does not cause the size of the government to increase but an increase in the government s size does result when i there are constraints on the government s ability to change tax shares in response to a shift in group power or ii there is a publicly provided good which benefits one untaxed group and that group s sole concern with government policy is to maximize the amount of the good that it gets the paper concludes by considering some of the normative implications of the results ii interest groups in the electoral process there are two sets of actors in the model parties and interest groups and two sets of relationships which must be analyzed the relationships between interest groups and the parties and the relationship between the parties themselves with respect to the first question this paper investigates the determinants of each interest group s influence on the platforms proposed by the parties with respect to the second it explores whether the competition for votes between the parties produces an equilibrium and if so what its properties are

macroeconomic policy in a two party system as a repeated game this paper considers the interaction of two parties with different objectives concerning inflation and unemployment and rational and forward looking wage setters if discretionary policies are followed an economic cycle related to the political cycle results in equilibrium this cycle is significantly different from the traditional political business cycle reputational mechanisms due to the repeated interaction of the two parties and the public or commitments to a common policy rule can improve upon the discretionary outcome by reducing or eliminating the magnitude of the economic fluctuations

centripetal and centrifugal incentives under different electoral systems inaseminalarticle cox 1990 suggestedthatelectoralsystemswithlargerdistrictmagnitudesprovideincentivesforparties to advocate more extreme policy positions in this article we put this proposition to the test informed by recent advances in spatial models of party competition we introduce a design that embeds the effect of electoral rules in the utility function of voters we then estimate the equilibrium location of parties as the weight voters attach to the expected distribution of seats and votes changes our model predicts that electoral rules affect large and small parties in different ways we find centripetal effects only for parties that are favorably biased by electoral rules by contrast smaller parties see their vote share decline and are pushed toward more extreme equilibrium positions evidence from 13 parliamentary democracies supports model predictions along with testing the incentives provided by electoral rules results carry implications for the strategies of vote maximizing parties and for the role of small parties in multiparty competition

the variable choice set logit model applied to the 2004 canadian election formal work on the electoral model often suggests that parties should locate at the electoral mean recent research has found no evidence of such convergence in order to explain non convergence the stochastic electoral model is extended by including a competence and sociodemographic valance in a country where regional and national parties compete in the election that is the model allows voters to face different sets of parties in different regions we introduce the notion of a convergence coefficient c for regional and national parties and show that when c is high there is a significant centrifugal tendency acting on parties an electoral survey of the 2004 election in canada is used to construct a stochastic electoral model of the election with two regions quebec and the rest of canada the survey allows us to estimate voter positions in the policy space the variable choice set logit model is used to built a relationship between party position and vote share we find that in the local nash equilibrium for the election the two main parties with high competence valence the liberals and conservatives locate at the national electoral mean and the bloc quebecois with the highest competence valence locates at the quebec electoral mean the new democratic party has a low competence valence but remains at the national mean the greens with lowest competence valence locate away from the national mean to increase its vote share

securing the base electoral competition under variable turnout i evaluate the securing the base strategy which prescribes that candidates position themselves away from the political center in order to maximize turnout among their supporters and reduce defections of their supporters to third party candidates my results support the notion that voters abstain due to indifference and imply that candidate positioning has a large effect on voter turnout and third party voting nonetheless my results indicate that the candidates can best compete by adopting centrist positions while a candidate can increase turnout among his supporters by moving away from the center many moderate voters will defect to his opponent

does proportional representation foster closer congruence between citizens and policy makers this article assesses the claim that proportional representation pr fosters a closer correspondence between the views of citizens and the positions of the government the study uses the comparative study of electoral systems data set and compares respondents self placements on a left right scale with placements of cabinet parties locations in 31 election studies the authors argue that pr has two contradictory consequences on one hand pr leads to more parties and more choice for voters but these parties are less centrist and this increases the overall distance between voters and parties on the other hand pr increases the likelihood of coalition governments this pulls the government toward the center of the policy spectrum and reduces the distance between the government and voters these two contradictory effects of pr wash out and the net overall impact of pr on congruence is nil the data support the authors interpretation

party polarization in legislatures with office motivated candidates we develop a theory of legislative competition in which voters care about local candidate valence and national party positions that are determined by the parties median legislators as long as election outcomes are sufficiently predictable the only stable equilibria exhibit policy divergence between the parties if the degree of uncertainty about election outcomes decreases and if voters place less weight on local candidates valence polarization between the parties increases furthermore a systematic electoral shock makes the party favored by the shock more moderate while the disadvantaged party becomes more extreme finally we examine data on state elections and the ideological positions of state legislatures and find patterns that are consistent with key predictions of our model

u s presidential elections 1968 80 a spatial analysis a methodology is presented for empirical estimation of spatial models of voting in mass elections the basic choice model posits utility functions that depend on spatial distance and a random error term the parameters of the utility functions are estimated by a polytomous logit model which is applied to spatial maps of voters and candidates for all presidential elections since 1968 these maps indicate that presidential candidates take positions at the periphery of the distribution of voters results based on these maps support the hypothesis of sincere spatial voting in two candidate elections in three candidate elections the coefficients of the voter utility function adjust to proxy for the lesser viability of the minor party candidate in contrast to choice turnout shows only weak spatial effects the data are inconsistent with the proposition that turnout is low because voters are not offered distinct alternatives while the utility function used by voters appears stable through time and candidate and voter positions appear stable in the last few months prior to an election voter and candidate positions exhibit substantial change over longer time periods

issues economics and the dynamics of multiparty elections the british 1987 general election we offer a model of multiparty elections that combines voters retrospective economic evaluations with consideration of parties issue positions and the issue preferences of voters we show that both policy issues and the state of the economy matter in british elections in 1987 voters made a largely retrospective evaluation of the conservatives based on economic performance those who rejected the conservative party chose between labour and alliance based on issue positions through simulations we move the parties in the issue space and reestimate vote shares as well as hypothesize an alternative distribution of views on the economy and we show that labour had virtually no chance to win with a centrist party as a viable alternative the predictions from our 1987 simulations are supported in an analysis of the 1992 british election we argue for multinomial probit in studying three party elections because it allows for a richer formulation of politics than do competing methods

a statistical model for multiparty electoral data we propose an internally consistent and comprehensive statistical model for analyzing multiparty district level aggregate election data this model can be used to explain or predict how the geographic distribution of electoral results depends upon economic conditions neighborhood ethnic compositions campaign spending and other features of the election campaign or characteristics of the aggregate areas we also provide several new graphical representations for help in data exploration model evaluation and substantive interpretation although the model applies more generally we use it to help resolve an important controversy over the size of and trend in the electoral advantage of incumbency in great britain contrary to previous analyses which are all based on measures now known to be biased we demonstrate that the incumbency advantage is small but politically meaningful we also find that it differs substantially across the parties about half a percent for the conservatives 1 for the labor party and 3 for the liberal party and its successors also contrary to previous research we show that these effects have not grown in recent years finally we are able to estimate from which party each party s incumbency advantage is predominantly drawn

why candidate divergence should be expected to be just as great or even greater in competitive seats as in non competitive ones basic downsian theory predicts candidate convergence toward the views of the median voter in two candidate elections common journalistic wisdom moreover leads us to expect these centripetal pressures to be strongest when elections are expected to be close yet the available evidence from the us congress disconfirms this prediction to explain this counterintuitive result we develop a spatial model that allows us to understand the complex interactions of political competition partisan loyalties and incentives for voter turnout that can lead office seeking candidates especially candidates in close elections to emphasize policy appeals to their voter base rather than courting the median voter

valence politics and equilibrium in spatial election models spatial models of two party or two candidatecompetition almost never have pure strategy nashequilibria when the issue space has more than onedimension this paper shows that the introduction ofvalence issues can create conditions where equilibriaexist even in a multidimensional setting we derivesufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria and characterize the spatial locations of twocompeting parties or candidates when such equilibriaexist the party with the advantage on the valencedimension will generally take a moderate position onthe positional issues we consider the implications ofthese results for public perceptions of the parties incumbency advantages and realigning elections

lessons in disguise multivariate predictive mistakes in collective choice models many political processes can be characterized as repeated collective decisions in which individual choices rendered by the same actors are combined to produce salient outcomes e g voting in legislatures the inherent interdependence among the choices within repeated collective decisions is often missed in statistical analysis i introduce the joint prediction error jpe a grouping of individual decisions that is poorly predicted by a model jpes capture the intersecting information missed by conventional diagnostics i demonstrate the use of jpes on data from two published articles one on u s supreme court voting and another on international defense alliances

modeling government popularity in postwar britain a methodological example economic theory suggests that government popularity may be related to the rate of change of nonstationary economic quantities and the level of stationary financial variables like inflation or interest rates political theory suggests that this relationship may not be stable over time we find that there is a well defined relationship between u k government popularity in the postwar period and a small set of economic variables i e unemployment inflation and real interest rates unusual political events are also important voters appear to discount history at a high rate remarkably the estimated equation is very stable and passes a battery of stability tests including postsample parameter stability tests furthermore estimation using the kalman filter shows no tendency for the parameters to vary systematically over time implying that voter preferences have remained broadly constant throughout the postwar years

aggregation and social choice a mean voter theorem a celebrated result of black 1948a demonstrates the existence of a simple majority winner when preferences are single peaked the social choice follows the preferences of the median voter the median voter s most preferred outcome beats any alternative however this conclusion does not extend to elections in which candidates differ in more than one dimension this paper provides a multi dimensional analog of the median voter result we provide conditions under which the mean voter s most preferred outcome is unbeatable according to a 64 majority rule the conditions supporting this result represent a significant generalization of caplin and nalebuff 1988 the proof of our mean voter result uses a mathematical aggregation theorem due to prekopa 1971 1973 and borell 1975 this theorem has broad applications in economics an application to the distribution of income is described at the end of this paper results on imperfect competition are presented in the companion paper caplin and nalebuff 1991

multiparty spatial competition with probabilistic voting i develop a general model of multiparty competition in which parties model voters choices by means of probabilistic choice rules the model is specified in terms of an issue salience coefficient which varies with the importance voters attach to issues as opposed to unmeasured nonissue motivations i show that when the policy salience coefficient is sufficiently low then both vote maximizing and rank maximizing parties have a dominant strategy to adopt the most popular platform which maximizes voter utilities over the entire electorate this most popular platform therefore represents a convergent equilibrium when all parties are vote or rank maximizing numerical estimates suggest that this equilibrium result holds for degrees of issue voting which exceed the parameters behavioral researchers have estimated for various historical elections

multicandidate equilibrium in american elections the united states presidential election of 1992 is anexample of a multicandidate contest involving bothdemocratic and republican candidates using a spatialmodelling approach i analyze candidate policystrategy for such elections under the assumption thatvoters choose according to the multivariate votingmodel of behavioral research this model representsvoters decisions as probabilistic functions of theirpolicy preferences and political partisanship isuggest reasons why partisan voting motivatescandidates to locate near their party s partisans inthe policy space and illustrate this argument withrespect to the 1992 presidential election the resultsof computer simulations suggest that these motivationslead to multicandidate spatial equilibria which arerobust to changes in the model s parameters partisanship appears to be an important source ofstability in multicandidate electoral competition

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

privatization and the british electorate microeconomic policies macroeconomic evaluations and party support despite much scholarly research on the link between macroeconomic evaluations and political behavior relatively little is known about the influence of government economic policy on this process margaret thatcher s recent sales of public assets privatization in britain provide a unique opportunity to examine the link between microeconomic activity measured by privatization macroeconomic evaluations and voting by applying multivariate analysis to data collected during the 1983 and 1987 general elections we show that privatization measured by share purchases and council house ownership stimulates positive judgments about the country s economy however the effect of privatization on the vote is almost entirely indirect via these retrospective judgments about the economy while privatization has undoubtedly benefited the conservatives electorally the evidence on council house purchases suggests that the impact may be temporary

the demand for enhanced annuities abstract this paper examines market reaction to the introduction of enhanced annuities in a market for deferred standard annuities the previous literature shows that individuals can try to avoid risk classification by contracting a standard annuity earlier in their life this paper offers a new perspective to the timing of the annuity purchase under the assumption that individuals already have an idea about their future risk type when young which becomes clearer over time it shows that enhanced annuities can crowd out earlier standard annuities completely if the individuals have incomplete knowledge of their future risk type however if individuals are sufficiently risk averse and there is a sufficiently high proportion of low risks in the population both products can remain in the market where lower risk types buy enhanced annuities while the higher risks stick to the early standard annuities the paper identifies the equilibrium candidate with both annuity types to be pareto superior and the unique equilibrium

when politics and models collide estimating models of multiparty elections theory the spatial model of elections can better be represented by using conditional logit models which consider the position of the parties in issue spaces than by multinomial logit models which only consider the position of voters in the issue space the spatial model and random utility models in general suffer from a failure to adequately consider the substitutability of parties sharing similar or identical issue positions hypotheses multinomial logit is not necessarily better than successive applications of binomial logit conditional logit allows for considering more interesting political questions than does multinomial logit the spatial model may not correspond to voter decision making in multiple party settings multinomial probit allows for a relaxation of the iia condition and this should improve estimates of the effect of adding or removing parties methods comparisons of binomial logit multinomial logit conditional logit and multinomial probit on simulated data and survey data from multiparty elections results multinomial logit offers almost no benefits over binomial logit conditional logit is capable of examining movements by parties whereas multinomial logit is not multinomial probit performs better than conditional logit when considering the effects of altering the set of choices available to voters estimation of multinomial probit with more than three choices is feasible

political parties world demand and unemployment domestic and international sources of economic activity this article replicates and extends earlier work on the politics of macroeconomic policy by considering political effects on unemployment in 14 western industrial nations between 1960 and 1983 changes of party control of government display broadly the expected effects namely that unemployment falls under left wing governments and rises under right wing governments however the principal conclusions of this article are that partisan effects on unemployment in open economies that is economies heavily dependent on trade with other countries can only be satisfactorily estimated relative to the constraint imposed by the level of world economic activity and that in addition to politicians strategic incentives political institutions and economic regime constraints also determine whether partisan effects on unemployment will be sustained transitory or absent with respect to the latter on the whole no effects are found where no such effects were promised by the new government before taking office where one party or dominant partner coalitions form the effect on unemployment is transitory whereas where broad coalitions form it is sustained or absent finally ceteris paribus any partisan effects are more likely where governments secure parliamentary majorities

campaign allocations under probabilistic voting we develop a probabilistic voting model where candidates compete by advertising in different media markets ads are viewed by everyone within a market and cannot be targeted to subgroups such as one candidate s partisans candidates estimate the distribution of voter preference intensities in a market and campaign ads then shift this distribution individuals with any intensity vote with some probability for each candidate we derive comparative static implications of changes in a variety of factors on the advertising decisions of each candidate using campaign advertising data from 2002 we find these results to be consistent with actual campaign allocation behavior

covering dominance and institution free properties of social change this paper shows that different institutional structures for aggregation of preferences under majority rule may generate social choices that are quite similar so that the actual social choice may be rather insensitive to the choice of institutional rules specifically in a multidimensional setting where all voters have strictly quasi concave preferences it is shown that the uncovered set contains the outcomes that would arise from equilibrium behavior under three different institutional settings the three institutional settings are two candidate competition in a large electorate cooperative behavior in small committees and sophisticated voting behavior in a legislative environment where the agenda is determined endogenously because of its apparent institution free properties the uncovered set may provide a useful generalization of the core when a core does not exist a general existence theorem for the uncovered set is proven and for the downsian case bounds for the uncovered set are computed these bounds show that the uncovered set is centered around a generalized median set whose size is a measure of the degree of symmetry of the voter ideal points

imperfectly informed voters and strategic extremism we analyze a two candidate downsian model considering that voters use shortcuts e g interest group media endorsements to infer candidates policy platforms that is voters do not observe candidates exact platforms but only which candidate offers the more leftist rightist platform relative positions in equilibrium candidates behavior tends to maximum extremism but it may converge or diverge depending on how voters behave when indifferent policywise between the candidates when the tie breaking rule used by the voters is sufficiently fair candidates converge to the extreme preferred by the median voter but when it strongly favors a certain candidate each candidate specializes in a different extreme

insurance induced moral hazard a dynamic model of within year medical care decision making under uncertainty health insurance may lead individuals to overconsume medical care many studies explore this moral hazard using models that aggregate medical care decisions up to the annual level using employer employee matched data from the medical expenditure panel survey meps i estimate moral hazard using a dynamic model of within year medical care consumption that allows for endogenous health transitions variation in medical care prices and individual uncertainty within a health insurance year i then estimate moral hazard under a second set of conditions that are consistent with the assumptions of most annual decision making models the within year decision making model produces a moral hazard estimate that is 19 2 larger than the alternative model i highlight the importance of controlling for within year dynamics in a model of medical care consumption using a counterfactual policy simulation that implements the individual mandate provision of the 2010 patient protection and aordable care act i nd that full implementation of the policy decreases the percentage of uninsured individuals in the population being analyzed from 11 8 to 6 0 furthermore when all uninsured individuals are forced into coverage their predicted annual medical care expenditure increases by 45 5

pre electoral commitments and government formation recent studies show that pre electoral commitments and the ideological distance between parties influence government formation but do pre electoral pacts or rejections of party combinations really have an independent impact on the outcome of the government formation game which policy areas matter when parties agree to build a coalition this paper addresses these questions by applying a dataset that includes information on preferred rejected coalition partners and the policy area specific programmatic heterogeneity of all potential coalitions the results show that pre electoral commitments have a significant impact on government formation after controlling for endogeneity problems there is also evidence that not only diversity in economic issues determines the partisan composition of governments

modeling choice of fuelwood source among rural households in malawi a multinomial probit analysis abstract this paper addresses two questions what determines household s choice of fuelwood source and what are the environmental consequences of fuelwood collection choices we address these questions by estimating the multinomial probit model using survey data for households surrounding chimaliro and liwonde forest reserves in malawi after controlling for heterogeneity among households we find strong substitution opportunities across fuelwood collection sources attributes of the fuelwood sources size and species composition and distance to the sources are the most important determinants of fuelwood choice further results show that customary managed forests generate environmental benefits by reducing pressure on both plantation forests and forest reserves these findings support the need to strengthen community based institutions to manage local forest resources

inequality redistribution and the rise of outsider candidates abstract we provide a model of electoral competition between an establishment and an outsider candidate in which each candidate has a fixed characteristic that voters care about and promises a policy of redistribution from skilled to unskilled voters the voters perceive the establishment candidate to be more beholden to special interests and therefore more likely to renege on a promise of a large policy change in favor of the status quo after the election the equilibrium features policy divergence and greater targeting of the electorally dominant voter group by the outsider candidate furthermore while higher income inequality leads to polarization of support for the two candidates it benefits the outsider candidate in a radical equilibrium with promises of greater redistribution these results provide a theoretical underpinning for the recent evidence that links voters economic distress due to trade exposure or skill biased technological change to support for outsider candidates

government partisanship labor organization and macroeconomic performance governments of the left and right have distinct partisan economic policies and objectives that they would prefer to pursue their propensity to do so however is constrained by their desire for reelection we argue that the ability of governments to further their partisan interests and preside over reelectable macroeconomic outcomes simultaneously is dependent on the organization of the domestic economy particularly the labor movement we hypothesize that there are two different paths to desirable macroeconomic performance in countries with densely and centrally organized labor movements leftist governments can promote economic growth and reduce inflation and unemployment conversely in countries with weak labor movements rightist governments can pursue their partisan preferred macroeconomic strategies and achieve similarly beneficial macroeconomic outcomes performance will be poorer in other cases these hypotheses are supported by analysis of pooled annual time series data for 16 advanced industrial democracies between 1967 and 1984

three candidate spatial competition when candidates have valence stochastic voting we study the effects of stochastic probabilistic voting on equilibrium locations equilibrium vote shares and comparative statics in a setup with three heterogeneous candidates and a single dimensional issue space comparing the equilibria with and without stochastic voting we find that under an appropriate level of uncertainty about voter behavior the model has a pure strategy nash equilibrium psne that is free from several non plausible features of the psne under deterministic voting this result is robust to extensions to asymmetric density and plurality maximization

uncertainty resolution and the timing of annuity purchases abstract this paper considers the question of why the annuity market is thin a model is presented in which consumers have the option of purchasing annuities before discovering their survival probability they can then recontract the initial choice after the resolution of this form of uncertainty it is shown that consumers purchase insurance against their own survival probability type at a very young age and do not undertake further transactions this characterization is then used to analze the effects of introducing future income uncertainty and to investigate the trade off between old age insurance motive and portfilio flexibility

optimum and risk class pricing of annuities when information on longevity survival functions is unknown early in life individuals have an interest in insuring themselves against moving into different risk classes as their life expectancy is revealed the first best allocation involves transfers across states of nature with symmetric information competitive equilibrium separates different risk classes and cannot provide such transfers because insurance firms are unable to precommit when utility is invariant to risk class realisation the optimum entails uniform consumption and optimum retirement age independent of risk class and an optimum social security scheme is superior to competitive equilibrium when preferences depend on risk class welfare ranking of systems becomes indeterminate much work has been undertaken by economists to understand and rationalise the annuity puzzle the fact that the markets for private voluntarily purchased annuities

the economics and politics of the structure of public expenditure the paper derives a complete system ofdemand equations for public consumptionexpenditures as the outcome of rationalbehaviour in a model where governmentmaximizes expected electoral support theallocation of expenditures is found todepend not only on the prices of publicservices and total expenditure and tosatisfy the constraints of demand theory which have been the focus of attention ofprevious empirical studies of theallocation of public expenditures but inaddition on the prices of privateconsumption goods the distribution ofvoter incomes and the expected change invoter support from varying the levels ofpublic provision

elections with platform and valence competition abstract we study a game in which candidates first choose platforms and then invest in costly valences e g engage in campaign spending the marginal return to valence depends on platform polarization the closer platforms are the more valence affects the election outcome consequently candidates without policy preferences choose divergent platforms to soften valence competition moreover exogenous increases in incentives for valence accumulation lead to both increased valence and increased polarization the latter because candidates seek to avoid the costs of extra valence as a result the increase in valence is smaller than it would have been with exogenous platforms finally the model highlights the overlooked substantive importance of common modeling assumptions changing the source of uncertainty in our model from noise around the median voter s ideal point to a shock to one candidate s valence as is common in the literature leads to complete platform convergence for all parameter values

equilibrium in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting this paper presents a multicandidate spatial model of probabilistic voting in which voter utility functions contain a random element specific to each candidate the model assumes no abstentions sincere voting and the maximization of expected vote by each candidate we derive a sufficient condition for concavity of the candidate expected vote function with which the existence of equilibrium is related to the degree of voter uncertainty we show that under concavity convergent equilibrium exists at a minimum sum point at which total distances from all voter ideal points are minimized we then discuss the location of convergent equilibrium for various measures of distance in our examples computer analysis indicates that non convergent equilibria are only locally stable and disappear as voter uncertainty increases

dynamic pie a strategy for modeling trade offs in compositional variables over time the substance of politics involves competition that evolves over time while our theories about competition emphasize trade offs across multiple categories most empirical models tend to oversimplify them by considering trade offs between one category and everything else we propose a research strategy for testing theories about trade off relationships that shape dynamic compositional variables this approach improves current methods used to analyze compositional dependent variables by addressing two limitations first although scholars have considered compositional dependent variables they have done so in contexts that were not dynamic second current approaches toward graphical presentations become unwieldy when the compositional dependent variable has more than three categories we demonstrate the utility of our strategy to expand current theories of party support and political budgeting in both cases we can extend trade offs across pairs of alternatives e g prime minister versus all other parties or spending on defense versus everything else to competition across multiple alternatives

a model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage that under some fairly weak assumptions for all levels of the valence advantage the advantaged candidate chooses a more moderate position than the disadvantaged candidate empirical studies of congressional elections by fiorina 1973 and ansolabehere snyder and stewart 2001 support this result d owns 1957 seminal work presents a puzzle for scholars of u s elections why do candidates not converge to the median voter one of the best explanations is that the candidates themselves have ideological preferences as calvert 1985 and wittman 1977 1983 have shown when candidates have such preferences and they are sufficiently uncertain about the preferences of the median voter then they do not converge although they may moderate their positions from their ideal point the basic version of the calvert wittman model however does not account for another basic fact of u s elections often one of the candidates has an advantage due to a nonpolicy factor such as incumbency greater campaign funds better name recognition superior charisma superior intelligence and so on stokes has dubbed such factors valence factors and he has noted their importance in u s elections stokes 1963 1992 1 in this article i extend the basic calvert wittman model by giving one candidate a valence advantage over the other i show that if the valence characteristics of the candidates are approximately equal then when a candidate s valence advantage increases this causes her to move toward the

principle vs pragmatism policy shifts and political competition this article investigates the electoral effect of party policy shifts i argue that whether party policy shifts are damaging or rewarding depends on whether the shift occurs in the pragmatic or principled issue domain on pragmatic issues voters value getting things done policy shifts in this domain signal responsiveness to the changing environment and are likely to be rewarded principled issues however concern core beliefs and values any policy shift in this domain is a sign of inconsistency and lack of credibility which is likely to lead to voter withdrawal these arguments are supported by evidence from 23 advanced democracies over a period of 40 years

policy divergence in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting existing models of multicandidate spatial competition with probabilistic voting typically predict a high degree of policy convergence yet in actual elections candidates advocate quite divergent sets of policies what accounts for this disparity between theory and empirical observation i introduce two variations on the basic probabilistic vote model which may account for candidate policy divergence 1 a model which incorporates candidate specific variables so that candidates may enjoy nonpolicy related electoral advantages or disadvantages 2 a model which allows nonzero correlations between the random terms associated with voters candidate utilities thereby capturing situations where voters view two or more candidates as similar on nonpolicy grounds i report candidate equilibrium analyses for each model which show far greater policy divergence than exists under the standard probabilistic vote model i then analyze the strategic logic which underlies these results

heightening comparativists concern for model choice voting behavior in great britain and the netherlands as the research methodology more closely approximates the causal process being analyzed the inferences and predictions derived from that methodology will better represent actual behavior statistical models were specified on the basis of accepted theories of voting behavior and political cleavages in the netherlands and great britain we hypothesize that multinomial models provide a more accurate characterization of voting behavior in countries with more than two political parties competing for votes binomial logit multinomial logit and nested multinomial logit models of voting behavior are estimated on dutch and british national election study data compared to binomial methods we find that multinomial models of voting behavior produce results that are more congruent with accepted theories of dutch and british politics

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

voters private valuation of candidates quality abstract different voters might have different valuations of candidates qualitative features we argue that this intuitive fact acts as a strong stabilizing force in electoral competition dynamics when candidates are office motivated pure strategy equilibria may exist unlike when all voters favor the same candidate perhaps more importantly it affects candidates platform moderation incentives in a rather intriguing manner when voters are evenly split in terms of their candidates quality valuations then both candidates have incentives to locate sufficiently near but not necessarily exactly at the center of the policy space however as the number of voters who favor the same candidate rises maximum equilibrium differentiation follows a non trivial u shaped pattern it is first decreasing and then increasing in the fraction of voters who prefer the more popular candidate

an empirical analysis of household energy choice in ghana abstract using data from two recently available living standards surveys we trace the dynamics in cooking fuel choice among ghanaian households over the period 2005 6 and 2012 13 and further investigate the main forces driving households choice of a cooking fuel evidence from this paper reveals a significant transition from fuelwood use towards lpg over the period results further reveal factors such as price reliability in supply of lpg income and other household attributes as significant factors influencing households choice of a given energy type for cooking relevant policy prescriptions are offered to engender sustainable energy use and reduce over reliance on the already depleted forest resources for biomass energy

multidimensional electoral competition between differentiated candidates it is known that multidimensional downsian competition fails to admit an equilibrium in pure strategies unless very stringent conditions on the distribution of voters bliss points are imposed plott 1967 this paper revisits this problem considering that the two vote share maximizing candidates are dierentiated that is candidates strategically decide po sitions only in some of the n dimensions while in the rest their positions are assumed to be xed these xed dimensions may be viewed as candidates immutable characteristics race religion culture etc we nd that if candidates are su ciently dierentiated if in the xed dimensions their positions are su ciently dierent then a unique nash equilibrium in pure strategies is guaranteed to exist for any distribution of voters bliss points perhaps more importantly we show that this is true even if there exists a unique xed dimension and candidates instrumentally decide their positions in all other n 1 dimensions

party policy diffusion do parties learn from or emulate parties in other political systems this research develops the argument that parties are more likely to employ the heuristic of learning from and emulating foreign successful incumbent parties spatial econometric analyses of parties election policies from several established democracies robustly confirm that political parties respond to left right policy positions of foreign political parties that have recently governed by showing that parties respond to these foreign incumbent parties this work has significant implications for our understanding of party competition furthermore we contribute to the literature on public policy diffusion as we suggest that political parties are important vehicles through which public policies diffuse

old age longevity and mortality contingent claims this paper analyzes the savings and longevity impacts of mortality contingent claims defined here as income measures such as annuities and life insurance under which earned income is contingent on the length of one s life the postwar increase in mandatory annuity and life insurance programs as well as the rapid increase in the life expectancy of older ages motivates a better understanding of the incentive effects that mortality contingent claims have on longevity related behavior we claim that these incentives in often alter the standard conclusions obtained about old age support when mortality is treated exogenously in particular we argue that annuities involve moral hazard effects that increase longevity and among other things introduce a positive interaction between public programs for health care and income support for the elderly programs that have grown enormously in developed countries

the mean voter theorem necessary and sufficient conditions for convergent equilibrium formal models of elections have emphasized the convergence of party leaders towards the centre of the electoral distribution this paper attempts to resolve the apparent disparity between the formal result and the perception of political divergence by considering a model incorporating valence valence can be interpreted as the non policy basis of political judgement made by the electorate concerning the quality of political contenders the theorem presented here shows that there is a necessary condition for convergence the condition involves the difference in party valences and the electoral variance when the condition fails the low valence parties will be forced to adopt policy positions far from the electoral centre the inference appears to be substantiated by an empirical model of the israel election in 1996 copyright 2007 wiley blackwell

vote motivated candidates abstract we study stochastic voting models where the candidates are allowed to have any smooth strictly increasing utility functions that translate vote shares into payoffs we find that if a strict nash equilibrium exists in a model with an infinite number of voters then nearby equilibria should exist for similar large but finite electorates if the votes are independent random events then equilibria will not depend on the utility functions of the candidates our results have implications for existing models of redistributive politics and spatial competition as the properties of pure strategy equilibria in such games carry over to equilibria in games with arbitrary candidate preferences on the other hand candidate utility functions will matter if the individual voting decisions are correlated in the presence of aggregate uncertainty such as changing economic conditions or political scandals the preferences of parties and candidates with respect to shares of votes will have an effect on political competition

on 64 majority rule introduction d une definition de consensus social base sur deux restrictions une sur les preferences individuelles et l autre sur la distribution des preferences dans ce cas de consensus une regle de majorite a 64 presente de nombreuses proprietes interessantes par opposition aux regles de super majorite possedant des proprietes paradoxales comme les regles electorales americaines

rational voting and candidate entry under plurality rule we analyze a formal model of electoral competition under plurality rule that is characterized by two novel features first rather than assuming a fixed field of candidates we allow candidates to make decisions regarding entry as well as location second voters in our model are strategically rational that is they maximize utility over expected policy outcomes rather than simply voting for the ideologically closest candidate given these assumptions all equilibria in this model are such that the set of entrants locates at the median voter s ideal point this result stands in sharp contrast to earlier models of multicandidate competition in which entry is not allowed and voters vote sincerely

a spatial analysis of candidate competition in dual member districts the 1989 chilean senatorial elections this study uses empirical spatial theory to evaluate candidate and voter behavior in senate elections contested during the 1989 chilean general election the study evaluates whether senatorial candidates competing in dual member districts under chilean d hondt locate near the periphery or interior of the electoral space spatial analyses demonstrate the chilean senatorial electoral system is characterized by centrifugal forces in particular candidates of the right locate on the periphery of the space and face few incentives to pursue moderate electoral strategies the study also characterizes bases of party and candidate support and the underlying dimensions of political competition spatial analysis reveals both change and continuity in the pre and post authoritarian electoral universes

social policy responsiveness in developed democracies do mass policy preferences influence the policy output of welfare states in developed democracies this is an important issue for welfare state theory and research and this article presents an analysis that builds from analytical innovations developed in the emerging literature on linkages between mass opinion and public policy the authors analyze a new dataset combining a measure of social policy preferences with data on welfare state spending alongside controls for established causal factors behind social policy making the analysis provides evidence that policy preferences exert a significant influence over welfare state output guided also by statistical tests for endogeneity the authors find that cross national differences in the level of policy preferences help to account for a portion of the differences among social christian and liberal welfare state regimes the results have implications for developing fruitful connections between welfare state scholarship comparative opinion research and recent opinion policy studies

spatial voting in the 2004 presidential election the theory of spatial voting has played a large role in the development of important results across many areas of political science directly testing the foundational assumptions of spatial voting theory however has not been possible with existing data using a novel survey design this article obtains estimates of voter ideology on the same scale as candidate positions the results of this scaling demonstrate that voters possess meaningful ideologies and furthermore that these beliefs are strongly related to the sorts of policy proposals considered in congress these ideology estimates are then used to uncover the actual relationships between ideology and vote choice for citizens of various types in the 2004 presidential election although the choices of independent voters are shown to be largely consistent with the assumptions of spatial voting theory the decision rules used by partisans differ strongly from what unbiased spatial voting would imply although partisans do converge toward the behavior of independents and hence toward the assumptions of spatial voting theory as information levels increase we see that even highly informed partisans show significant differences from what would be implied by unbiased spatial voting theory

spatial models of political competition under plurality rule a survey of some explanations of the number of candidates and the positions they take this paper surveys work that uses spatial models of political competition to explain the number of candidates and the positions that they take in plurality rule elections

local equilibrium equivalence in probabilistic voting models abstract electoral equilibria depend upon candidates motivations maximization of expected vote share may not lead to the same behavior as maximization of the probability of winning the election accordingly it is desirable to understand when electoral equilibria are insensitive to the choice of candidate motivations this paper examines sufficient conditions for local equilibrium equivalence between expected vote share maximization and maximization of probability of victory in the spatial model of elections with probabilistic voters

who wins determining the party of the prime minister the prime ministership is the preeminent political post in parliamentary democracies yet few studies examine pm party choice perhaps under the assumption that the choice is a simple function of party size in this article we argue that key strategic actors and the context in which government negotiations take place can play a critical role in pm party choice we test our hypotheses using a mixed logit with random coefficients on an original data set comprising pm selection opportunities in 28 european countries our methodological approach allows us to incorporate qualitative concerns about heterogeneity and causal complexity into our analysis contrary to conventional wisdom we find that the largest party is often disadvantaged when it comes to pm party choice that some presidents play an influential role in choosing the pm and that the value of being the incumbent depends on one s performance in office and how the previous government ended

the strategic sources of foreign policy substitution while a growing body of work provides empirical support for the notion that political leaders substitute foreign policies depending on a variety of domestic political and economic conditions little work examines the underlying strategic causes of substitution this article argues that foreign states behave strategically in order to a avoid becoming the targets of domestically troubled executives or b to take advantage of the domestic trouble another state endures such strategic interaction delimits the set of foreign policies reasonably available to leaders in trouble at home thus producing the impetus for policy substitution this article develops a theoretical model of strategic behavior and policy substitution and reports empirical results of a multivariate probit model

are we witnessing a paradigm shift in the analysis of political competition this presidential address assesses the crisis of the downsian model of political competition in light of the mounting evidence on policy divergence and evaluates the possibility that the new theories of politicians quality and political selection provide an alternative theoretical conceptualization of political competition based on a critical review of the literature and on the author s works on content analysis of policy speeches income redistribution politicians quality and political legislation cycles this address concludes that multidimensional downsian models of political competition are adequate to explain policy divergence and points out the serious theoretical and empirical problems that models of political selection have to solve

the effects of alternative power sharing arrangements do moderating institutions moderate party strategies and government policy outputs advocates of consensual political institutions i e institutions that promote compromise and powersharing among political parties claim that these institutions promote moderation in government policy outputs to date however there exists little research either theoretical or empirical that evaluates whether consensual institutions promote moderation in parties policy declarations we develop a multiparty spatial model with policy seeking parties operating under proportional representation in which we vary the extent to which government policies reflect power sharing among all parties as opposed to being determined by a single party we determine parties optimal nash equilibrium policy positions and conclude that power sharing does not typically motivate parties to moderate their policy declarations in fact policy positioning under power sharing appears to be similar to or more extreme than under single party dominance consistent with previous research however we find that power sharing does promote moderation in government policy outputs our results have implications for parties election strategies for the design of political institutions and for representative government

don t stand so close to me spatial contagion effects and party competition in this article we bring together elements from the literatures on economic voting and spatial voting to gain theoretical leverage on the combined role of clarity of responsibility party policy positions and economic performance in elections building on evidence of voter knowledge we develop a theory of spatial contagion effects to explain how factors drawn from both of these literatures combine to shape changes in support for political parties we test this theory with a spatial autoregressive model of party competition in 23 nations from 1951 to 2005 as expected we find evidence of strong spatial contagion effects in elections with low clarity of responsibility

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

democracy and markets the case of exchange rates the relationships between the workings of democratic institutions and currency markets are studied severa competing propositions about how political re equilibration affects currency markets are derived and tested the results support the view that democratic politics affects currency markets expectations and uncertainty about electoral outcomes and government survival affect the probability of switching between currency market equilibria additionally opinion polls about chief executive performance have a direct effect on the probabilities of switches between currency regimes suggesting that these polls cause currency traders to revise their expectations about the stability of governments and or the contents of public policies electoral institutions mitigate the impact of politics on currency market equilibria political effects are weaker in countries with proportional representation electoral systems than in countries with majority plurality systems there is less evidence that central bank independence consensual corporatist systems or political coherency reduces the effect of politics on currency markets he study of democracy and markets is at the heart of political economy understanding how political equilibration and economic equilibration are related is one of the main challenges facing this field the size and nature of currency markets make them especially important cases substantively with globalization currency markets have become important constraints on elected governments reducing their room to maneuver analytically in comparison to most goods markets currency markets are informationally efficient asset markets with distinctive equilibria today s exchange rate is determined by currency traders fully informed expectations about tomorrow s exchange rate the sensitivity of these markets to the arrival of new information therefore makes them particularly well suited for studying the effects of political news and uncertainty on economic equilibration 1 this article demonstrates there are informationally relevant political factors insofar as exchange rate determination is concerned factors that directly affect the transition probabilities between currency market equilibria moreover these factors vary in important ways across democracies some electoral institutions lessen the effects of politics on currency

the swing voter s curse the authors analyze two candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters they demonstrate the existence of a swing voter s curse less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless the swing voter s curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another copyright 1996 by american economic association

the impact of the massachusetts health care reform on health care use among children in 2006 massachusetts enacted a major health care reform aimed at achieving near universal coverage in the state while other studies have found that this reform substantially affected the use of health services in general the impact of the reform on children is largely unexplored children are of special interest to policymakers because it is widely believed that better health in early childhood results in large payoffs to adult health and achievement i analyze how the reform affected the insurance coverage health care utilization patterns and health outcomes of children under 18 years old

the effect of government ideology on an exchange rate regime some international evidence this paper comprehensively investigates the effect of government ideology on the type of exchange rate regime that a country implements via multinomial logit and multinomial probit models for 147 countries in the period 1974 2009 our results clearly indicate that a left wing government increases the likelihood that a country implements a flexible regime in the classifications of exchange rate regimes nevertheless evidence is weaker when using the de jure imf course classification which is set up by ilzetzki et al 2008 in a deeper investigation we find that left wing governments are more likely to choose a flexible regime relative to a fixed one in our sample of oecd non oecd and non eurozone countries as the impacts from government ideology on the determinant of the choice of exchange rate regime in eurozone countries disappear more importantly we present many explanations for exchange rate regime choices when macroeconomic conditions political constraints and institutions impact the choice of exchange rate regime

the impact of nearly universal insurance coverage on health care utilization evidence from medicare the onset of medicare eligibility at age 65 leads to sharp changes in the health insurance coverage of the u s population these changes lead to increases in the use of medical services with a pattern of gains across socioeconomic groups that varies by type of service while routine doctor visits increase more for groups that previously lacked insurance hospital admissions for relatively expensive procedures like bypass surgery and joint replacement increase more for previously insured groups that are more likely to have supplementary coverage after 65 reflecting the relative generosity of their combined insurance package under medicare

a theory of voting in large elections this paper provides a game theoretic model of probabilistic voting and then examines the incentives faced by candidates in a spatial model of elections in our model voters strategies form a quantal response equilibrium qre which merges strategic voting and probabilistic behavior we first show that a qre in the voting game exists for all elections with a finite number of candidates and then proceed to show that with enough voters and the addition of a regularity condition on voters utilities a nash equilibrium profile of platforms exists when candidates seek to maximize their expected margin of victory this equilibrium 1 consists of all candidates converging to the policy that maximizes the expected sum of voters utilities 2 exists even when voters can abstain and 3 is unique when there are only 2 candidates