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Article: Satisficing and selection in electoral competition *.
- Article from:
- Quarterly Journal of Political Science
- Article date:
- March 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Now Publishers, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ABSTRACT
We model political parties as adaptive decision-makers who compete in a sequence of elections. The key assumptions are that winners satisfice (the winning party in period t keeps its platform in t + 1) while losers search. Under fairly mild assumptions about losers' search rules, we show that the sequence of winning platforms is absorbed into the top cycle of the (finite) set of feasible platforms with probability one. This implies that if there is a majority rule winner then ultimately the incumbent party will espouse it. However, our model, unlike Downs-Hotelling or Kollman-Miller-Page, does not predict full convergence: we show, under weak assumptions ...