Members of an assembly that chooses policies on a series of multidimensional ideological issues have incentives to coalesce and coordinate their votes, forming political parties. If an agent has an advantage to organize a party at a lower cost, a unique party forms and the policy outcome moves...

This work follows the citizen candidate model of Besley and Coate (1997) to show that for a unidimensional policy issue, a moderate default policy rules out equilibrium outcomes in which there is an uncontested candidate

We study repeated legislative bargaining in an assembly that chooses its bargaining rules endogenously, and whose members face an election after each legislative term. An agenda protocol or bargaining rule assigns to each legislator a probability of being recognized to make a policy proposal in...