Electoral Ambiguity and Political Representation

Electoral Democracy and Political Representation in the European Union

This paper addresses two particular aspects of the much debated democratic deficit in EU governance – the capacity of parties at the European level to represent the will of the citizens of Europe, and the absence of a system of party government at the European level, whereby parties in the parliament lack the capacity to effectively control the governing bodies of the EU. We first evaluate the ...

Strategic Ambiguity in Electoral Competition*

Many have observed that political candidates running for election are often purposefully expressing themselves in vague and ambiguous terms. In this paper we provide a simple formal model of this phenomenon. We model the electoral competition between two candidates as a two-stage game. In the first stage of the game two candidates simultaneously choose their ideologies, and in the second stage ...

Political equilibria with electoral uncertainty

After an election, when party positions and strengths are known, there may be a centrally located large party at the core position. Theory suggests that such a core party is able to form a minority government and control policy. In the absence of a core party, theory suggests that the outcome be a lottery associated with coalition risk. Stochastic models of elections typically indicate that all...

Philippine Political Parties, Electoral System and Political Reform

The Electoral Implications of Candidate Ambiguity

Uncertainty pervades the electoral arena. Many voters are unsure about the issue positions of candidates, either because candidates are deliberately ambiguous or because voters fail to receive campaign messages. In theory, uncertainty a¤ects how voters make choices, which strategies candidates adopt, and who wins or loses elections. In practice, though, problems of measurement and endogeneity h...