Different electoral rules provide different incentives for parties competing for votes to adopt emerging issues. As a result, new societal issues will be integrated at different speeds into the political arena, and ultimately, into policy. In order to study this question formally, I propose an extension of the standard spatial model of political competition that allows for issue adoption and more generally, issue prioritizing at the platform level. The paper then compares the outcome of party competition under proportional and plurality rule. Entry is allowed and incumbent parties act as Stackelberg leaders vis-à-vis potential entrants. The analysis highlights the interaction between entry barriers and the type of emerging issue in determining when and how a new issue will be introduced. The theory explains both internal (that is, without entry by a new party) realignments of party systems along new dimensions and entry as part of the process of political realignment.
Keywords: Comparison of electoral rules, new issue, electoral competition, entry, realignment, party system change
We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May’s Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on the robustness of Majority Rule due to Maskin (1995). In each case, geometry provides new insights on the working and interplay of the axioms, and suggests new results including a new characterization of the entire class of Majority Rule SWFs, a strengthening of May’s Theorem, and a new version of Maskin’s Theorem.
Bidders’ asymmetries are widespread in auction markets. Yet, their impact on behavior and, ultimately, revenue and profits is still not well understood. In this paper, I define a natural benchmark auction environment to which to compare any private value auction with asymmetrically distributed valuations. I show that the expected revenue from the benchmark auction always dominates that from the asymmetric auction, both in the first price auction and the second price auction. These results formalize and make transparent the idea that competition is reduced by bidders’ asymmetries. The paper also contributes to a better understanding of competition and the nature of rents in auction markets. Anonymity of the allocation mechanism seems to be an important factor.