Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Item

A computational electoral competition model with social clustering and endogenous interest groups as information brokers

Sadiraj, Vjollca
Tuinstra, Jan
Winden, Frans
Citations
Altmetric:
Abstract

We extend the basic model of spatial competition in two directions. First, political parties and voters do not have complete information but behave adaptively. Political parties use polls to search for policy platforms that maximize the probability of winning an election and the voting decision of voters is influenced by social interaction. Second, we allow for the emergence of interest groups. These interest groups transmit information about voter preferences to the political parties, and they coordinate voting behavior. We use simulation methods to investigate the convergence properties of this model. We find that the introduction of social dynamics and interest groups increases the separation between parties platforms, prohibits convergence to the center of the distribution of voter preferences, and increases the size of the winning set.

Description
Date
2004-01-01
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
Computational political economy, social dynamics, interest groups, spatial competition, polling, campaign contributions.
Citation
Embedded videos