We develop a theory of the emergence of minority and majority governments in multiparty parliamentary systems using a canonical non-cooperative bargaining model and assuming a policy space of arbitrary finite dimension, any number of political parties, and a general class of preferences over the...

We provide game-theoretic foundations for the median voter theorem in a one-dimensional bargaining model based on Baron and Ferejohn’s (1989) model of distributive politics. We prove that, as the agents become arbitrarily patient, the set of proposals that can be passed in any subgame perfect...

We establish that, except for a finite set of common costs of participation, all equilibria of a class of complete information voting games (as in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1983)) are regular. Thus, all the equilibria of these games (including those exhibiting high turnout rates) are robust to...

We establish that, except for a finite set of common costs of participation, all equilibria of a class of complete information voting games (as in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1983)) are regular. Thus, all the equilibria of these games (including those exhibiting high turnout rates) are robust to...

We show that, in the absence of symmetry or other parametric restrictions on legislators’ utility functions, roll call voting records cannot be used to estimate legislators’ ideal points unless we complement these data with information on the location of the alternatives being voted upon by...

We propose a reputational theory of two-party competition. We model the interaction of parties and the electorate as a stochastic game of incomplete information. The parties’ preferred policies (moderate or extreme) are possibly revealed to the electorate only via their policy choices while in...

We analyze a class of two-candidate voter participation games under complete information that encompasses as special cases certain public good provision games. We characterize the Nash equilibria of these games as stationary points of a non-linear programming problem, the objective function of...

In a canonical model of sequential collective bargaining over a divisible good we show that equilibrium expected payoffs are not restricted by players’ voting rights or their impatience. For all monotonic voting rules and discount factors, and for all divisions of the good among players, there...

For a class of n-player (n ? 2) sequential bargaining games with probabilistic recognition and general agreement rules, we characterize pure strategy Stationary Subgame Perfect (PSSP) equilibria via a finite number of equalities and inequalities. We use this characterization and the degree...

We develop a general theory for the emergence of minority governments in multiparty parliamentary systems using a bargaining model in the tradition of Baron and Ferejohn, 1989. We show that generically (i.e. except for a set of Lebesgue measure zero in the space of the model’s parameters)...