Arbeitspapier

Vox Populi, Vox Dei? Tacit Collusion in Politics

We study competition between political parties in repeated elections with probabilistic voting, allowing a multidimensional policy space and multiple political parties. This model entails multiple equilibria. When parties hold different opinions on some policy, they may take different policy positions that do not coincide with the median voter's preferred policy platform but converge towards it. In contrast, when parties have a mutual understanding on a particular policy, their policy positions may converge (on some dimension) but not to the median voter's preferred policy. Parties may collude with one another and take a position that differs from what the median voter prefers, despite political competition. Collusion may collapse, for instance, after the entry of a new political party. We substantiate the theoretical arguments with descriptive evidence using Swedish survey data on politicians and voters, which suggests that there is competition on some dimensions and collusion on others.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: IFN Working Paper ; No. 1393

Classification
Wirtschaft
Stochastic and Dynamic Games; Evolutionary Games; Repeated Games
Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
Capitalist Systems: Political Economy
Subject
Electoral competition
Partisan collusion
Probabilistic voting
Repeated elections
Tacit collusion

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Johansson, Christian
Kärnä, Anders
Meriläinen, Jaakko
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)
(where)
Stockholm
(when)
2021

Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Johansson, Christian
  • Kärnä, Anders
  • Meriläinen, Jaakko
  • Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)

Time of origin

  • 2021

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