Two-party competition with many constituencies (Q761930)

This paper considers the policy choices of candidates for legislative office in a single-member district, simple plurality system with n constituencies. There are two political parties \(\{\) A,B\(\}\) each consisting of exactly n candidates. The issue space is one-dimensional. While candidates in each constituency choose strategies so as to maximise votes in their respective constituencies, voters recognise that the actual policy outcome will be determined by which party controls the legislative. This is modelled by a given and known party aggregation mechanism which maps the policy positions of the n candidates of party i \((i=A,B)\) into the party i policy. A strong party equilibrium (SPE) corresponds to a situation where no group of candidates within either party can improve their expected votes. A set of minimal sufficient conditions for an equilibrium is given. The central result is that while party policies will coincide in equilibrium, candidates' policy positions need not converge. Moreover, each political party can more or less be partitioned into extreme left and right fractions.