A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last...

We survey critically the brief history of modeling party competition in general elections, beginning with the Hotelling-Downs model with a unidimensional policy space, and the Wittman model with endogenous parties, to the multi-dimensional citizen-candidate and PUNE models. Some applications of...

In a citizen candidate equilibrium, there are n candidates each of whom announces a policy in a policy space of dimension d. Thus the policy equilibrium lives in a space of dimension nd. We show, in a canonical example, that the equilibrium manifold is generically of dimension nd. In particular,...

A brief, historical review of the study of the interdependency between politics and economic distribution is offered. While the impact of economic interests on politics has been acknowledged for thousands of years, and the impact of politics on distribution for hundreds, it is only in the last...

We propose a theory of party competition (two parties, single-issue) where citizens acquire party membership by contributing money to a party, and where a member?s influence on the policy taken by her party is proportional to her campaign contribution. The polity consists of informed and...

We construct an equilibrium model of party competition, in which parties are especially concerned with their core and swing voters, concerns which American political scientists have focused upon in their attempts to understand party behavior in general elections. Parties compete on a large...

Anti-immigrant feeling (xenophobia) among voters has been proposed as a key factor explaining why, in the 2002 French national election, Jean Le Pen’s National Front Party won second place. Here, we study the effect of anti-immigrant sentiments among voters on the equilibrium position of...

Many suppose that democracy is an ethos which includes, inter alia, a degree of economic equality among citizens. In contrast, we conceive of democracy as ruthless political competition between groups of citizens, organized into parties. We inquire whether such competition, which we assume to be...