Endogenous party platforms: ‘stochastic’ membership

Endogenous Party Platforms: “stochastic” Membership

We analyze existence of divergent equilibria in a model of endogenous party platforms with stochastic membership. The parties proposals depend on their membership, while the membership depends both on the proposals of the parties and the unobserved idiosyncratic preferences of citizens over parties. It is shown that when citizens view the parties as similar, apart from their policy proposals (i...

Party Platforms with Endogenous Party Membership

In representative democracies, the development of party platforms depends on both ideological and electoral considerations. Decisions on party membership, on the other hand, are driven by the relative desirability of party platforms. This paper analyzes the dynamic interaction between party platforms and party membership. It shows how voter mobility, membership costs and the possibility of alie...

Endogenous Party Identities

A party develops its identity by adopting biased policy positions consistently over time. Existing rational voting models explain distinct party identities by assuming intrinsic policy-motivated parties or candidates. We show that distinct party identities may arise when parties are purely o ce-motivated in a dynamic setting with impressionable voters. In particular, a voter is more likely to v...

Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels

Observations consisting of measurements on relationships for pairs of objects arise in many settings, such as protein interaction and gene regulatory networks, collections of author-recipient email, and social networks. Analyzing such data with probabilisic models can be delicate because the simple exchangeability assumptions underlying many boilerplate models no longer hold. In this paper, we ...

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