We model political parties as adaptive decision-makers who compete in a sequence of elections. The key assumptions are that <italic>winners satisfice</italic> (the winning party in period <italic>t</italic> keeps its platform in <italic>t</italic> + 1) while <italic>losers search</italic>. Under fairly mild assumptions about losers' search rules, we show that...

The celebration of communitarianism by political philosophers (Sandel 1982) has apparently been extended to strategic analyses of ascriptively attuned norms (Fearon and Laitin 1996)—an intriguing development, given game theory's individualistic premises. We believe, however, that game theory...

We provide a set of new models of three different processes by which political parties nominate candidates for a general election: nominations by party leaders, nominations by a vote of party members, and nominations by a spending competition among potential candidates. We show that more extreme...

We examine the consequences of lobbying and vote buying, assuming this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two <italic>lobbyists</italic> compete for the votes of legislators by offering up-front payments to the legislators in exchange for their votes. We analyze how the lobbyists' budget constraints and...

We study countries choosing armament levels and then whether or not to go to war. We show that if the costs of war are not overly high or low, then all equilibria must involve dove, hawk, and deterrent strategies and the probability of war is positive (but less than one) in any given period....