Modeling Party Competition in General Elections
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چکیده
Popular elections are the central political act of democracies, and citizens in all advanced democracies organize their political competition through parties that compete in general elections. While political historians have studied parties for many years, it is remarkable that only in the last decade or so have there been serious attempts at abstract conceptualizations—that is, formal models—of interand intraparty competition in a democracy. In this chapter, I will report on the attempts to model political equilibrium among parties and its applications. Indeed, it appears that a satisfactory model of inter-party competition can only be constructed by paying careful attention to intra-party competition between conflicting interests or factions. In the advanced democracies, between 27 and 50 per cent of the gross national product is collected through taxation and disbursed by the state, and state policies are decided, ultimately, by popular elections. We no longer view the state as a benevolent social planner, which maximizes some social welfare function whose arguments are the utilities of its citizens; rather, in the new political economy, the state is pictured as
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