Political Competition and the Dynamics of Parties and Candidates Preliminary Draft

Standard models of political competition do not differentiate between parties and the candidates selected by those parties, nor between electoral competition and competition between parties for support and influence among the public. This paper introduces a framework that distinguishes between parties and their candidates, creating roles for both the importance of a party’s power (size) and of party leaders’ preferences for policy, which have been separately emphasized in the existing literature. For this interplay between party size and policy concerns to work, our model is dynamic. The paper provides results on existence and uniqueness of equilibria, investigates the impacts of party extremism on candidate choice and political polarization, a party’s decision whether or not to compete in an election, and conditions under which a dynamic median voter theorem can be obtained. We also show that if aggregate preferences are not transitive, political competition may not lead to moderation. ∗University of Illinois, Department of Economics, Urbana, IL 61801 USA; [email protected]