When to Run and When to Hide: Electoral Coordination and Exit

Elections represent a coordination problem for voters and candidates for office. Electoral coordination is also the causal mechanism behind any explanation of the relationship between electoral systems and the number of parties. I present a dynamic model of electoral coordination with candidate exit. The model extends two important results from the literature to a dynamic setting. The extension of Duverger’s Law and the median-voter theorem also offers a simultaneous prediction of the number of parties and their ideological positions. The model offers an explanation of why coordination failure sometimes occurs. ∗Département de science politique, Université de Montréal, CP 6128, Succ. Centre-Ville, Montréal, H3C 3J7, Canada. Email: [email protected]. I am grateful to Randall Calvert, John Duggan, Thomas Gschwend, Mark Fey, and Alan Wiseman for their helpful comments. I also wish to thank Political Institutions and Public Choice Program at Michigan State University for its support. I also acknowledge financial support from the Fulbright Foundation. All remaining errors are mine.