In this paper, we investigate the interactions among oligarchs, political parties, and voters using an agent-based modeling approach. We introduce the OLIGO model, which is based on the spatial model of democracy, where voters have positions in a policy space and vote for the party that appears closest to them, and parties move in policy space to seek more votes. We extend the existing literatu...

In this paper I study the strategic implications of coalition formation in an assembly. A coalition forms a voting bloc to coordinate the voting behavior of its members, acting as a single player and affecting the policy outcome. I prove that there exist stable endogenous voting bloc structures, and in an assembly with two parties I show how the incentives to join a bloc depend on the types of ...

Many security protocols hypothesize the existence of a trusted third party (TTP) to ease handling of computation and data too sensitive for the other parties involved. Subsequent discussion usually dismisses these protocols as hypothetical or impractical, under the assumption that trusted third parties cannot exist. However, the last decade has seen the emergence of hardware-based devices that,...

We develop a general model of redistribution and use it to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies. We show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions, whether these are conceived as electoral alliances between classes or alliances between class parties. Our ...

In this paper I test whether parties matter for fiscal policy choices, i.e., government spending and level of taxes. It is part of conventional wisdom that the Left spends and taxes more than the Right. However, there are very few convincing empirical studies that show this to be the case. I argue that this might reflect either the data sets used, or the employed methodology. By using a very la...

Simulation using agents has gained a wide prominence in a wide area of applications. In particular agent-based negotiation is concerned with simulating the behavior of parties interacting with each other to reach an agreement. In this paper, a construction-specific model for negotiation between agents representing contractors in a Reverse Auction Bid (RAB) is presented. RAB is a fairly new elec...

We reexamine the theory of rational voter participation where voting is by two collusive parties that can enforce social norms through costly peer punishment. This model nests both the ethical voter model and the pivotal voter model. We initially abstract from aggregate shocks to the population of voters in favor of the original Palfrey and Rosenthal [24] model and analyze the subsequent all-pa...

Forming an idea of the number of parties competing at elections or winning seats in legislatures is fundamental to disaggregated approaches to mapping party systems. We set out a method for systematically relating the behaviour of any ‘number of parties’ index to the size of the largest party’s vote and the numbers of parties in competition. This approach shows that the ‘effective number of par...