Electoral Competition and Party Positioning

Résumé

We survey the literature on the positioning of political parties in uni - and multidimensional policy spaces. We keep throughout the survey the assumption that there is an exogenous number of parties who commit to implement their policy proposals once elected. The survey stresses the importance of three modeling assumptions: (i) the source of uncertainty in election results, (ii) the parties'objectives (electoral - maximizing their expected vote share, or their probability of winning the elections'policy oriented or both), and (iii) the voters'preferences(if and how they care for parties beyond the policies implemented by the winner).