An Analysis on Simulation Models of Competing Parties

Down’s spatial theory of elections (1957) has occupied a prominent theoretical status within political science. Studies use a notion of ideological distance to develop explanations for observable electoral trends. In elections, voters by observing party ideologies and using the information to make decisions for their votes because voters do not always have enough information to appraise the difference of which they are aware. The Downsian idea suggests that parties’ effort to attract votes leads them to adopt a median position. However, many studies have questioned the result and have many different conclusions. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in learning and adaptive behaviour including simulation models. In this study, we model the dynamics of competing parties who make decisions in an evolving environment and construct simulation models of party competition. We illustrate and compare their consequences by analyzing two variants of computational models.