Abstract
This article explains political radicalism by the number of voters who are biased towards a party. With little voters biased in favor of a party, this party has to rely more heavily on its programmatic distance to other parties. Because large parties – i.e.: parties with a high number of biased voters – gain votes when they move to the center of the political spectrum, parties with a lower number of voters that are biased in their favor are forced to the edges of the policy space. We draw on a computational model of political competition between four parties in a two-dimensional policy space to investigate this relationship. We use panel corrected OLS estimates to analyze the data generated by the computer simulation. Our results substantiate the hypothesis of a negative relationship between the number of biased voters and the inclination of a party to adopt a more extreme policy stance. 2004 The Swiss Political Science Review.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-31 |
Number of pages | 31 |
Journal | Swiss Political Science Review |
Volume | 10 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2004 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Computer simulation
- Electoral bias
- Endogenous partisan preferences
- Multiparty competition
- Stochastic equilibrium