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The Evolution of Models of Party Competition

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Issue Voting and Party Competition

Part of the book series: Contributions to Political Science ((CPS))

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Abstract

This chapter describes the development within the field of spatial theory for analyzing party competition. I chose a historical approach, following the major developments within the area of spatial modeling to present the separate assumptions and components of the model in the order as they were introduced in the literature. The starting point is the standard Hotelling-Downs model and many of that model’s assumptions are adapted in the model that is presented later on in the book. The most important extension to the Downsian model was the introduction of a valence term, as conceptualized by Stokes, which will be described in detail in the second section of this chapter. As we move on to the more recent research on spatial modeling, contributions span a wider range, from specifications of the valence term over the separability of preferences in multidimensional policy spaces to modeling activist influence on parties’ policy positions. Given the richness of the literature, only those contributions will be considered, that are relevant with respect to the development of our model.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is research suggesting that city clock metrics better reflect political decision making of individuals, e.g. Humphreys and Laver (2009) and Singh (2014). This will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 5

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MZES, Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

    Anna-Sophie Kurella

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Kurella, AS. (2017). The Evolution of Models of Party Competition. In: Issue Voting and Party Competition. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53378-0_2

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