Party Leaders with Policy Preferences
Party Leaders with Policy Preferences
This chapter adapts the dynamic model of multiparty competition to take into account the possibility that party leaders take their own preferences into account when they set party policy. If they do this, they must make trade-offs between satisfying their private policy preferences and some other objective, whether this is maximizing party vote share or pleasing current party supporters. Models that specify such trade-offs have often been found intractable using traditional analytical techniques. However, they are straightforward to specify and analyze using computational agent-based modeling, though this does require a rethinking of the types of decision rules that party leaders might use. The chapter finds an analogue of the earlier finding that insatiable party leaders may win fewer votes than satiable leaders. Leaders who care only about their party's vote share may win fewer votes over the long haul than leaders who also care about their own policy preferences.
Keywords: party leaders, policy preferences, political parties, party competition, votes, multiparty competition
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
