Downsian Model of Party Competition Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Downsian Model of Party Competition - Essay Example he parties will gravitate towards the median voter in a system where there are two parties when the preferences are in a distributed format (Persson and Guido 12). There is also a corresponding ideology that voters will choose parties that are closer to their policy preferences are what they would like implemented as a matter of policy in the electoral contest. Downsian Model of Party Competition As already stated before, the Downsian model of party competition has got the assumption that parties formulate policies aimed at winning elections in that parties try to maximize their votes and that the median voter theorem applies. The median voter theorem referred to in the Downsian model of political contests holds that if all the policy preferences of the voters are peaked or looked at from a single dimension, then the most preferred point of the median voter is a point known as a Condorcet winner that all their preferences converge. This implies that there exists a policy that is pref erred in comparison to another that it may be paired with that makes parties not want to propose another platform that may not be a winner in an election. Therefore the Downsian model of political competition in a scenario where there are two parties gives a Nash Equilibrium where the party platforms can only converge to the median voter showing that divergence is more common due to the polarization of most parties depending n the preferences of voters. However, there are two requirements that must be fulfilled for the Downsian model to work which include the existence of Condorcet and the competition among parties to reach it. This is because the existence of the Condorcet winner is necessary for the Downsian model of competitive politics to possess a predictive power in the electoral... Downsian Model of Party Competition It explores what platforms that political parties acting in the interests of their candidates best espouse in an instance where voters have single-peaked preferences in an undimensional policy space. With the knowledge of the distribution of the median voters and their ideal points, the two political parties in the Downsian model can choose where to place their platforms in the policy space as the platforms serves as the candidate’s default policy position. It is imperative to note that if the candidates do not adopt the preferred position of the median voter, then their political parties too will not together implement the median voter’s median ideal position, as the parties prefer to differentiate from each other in terms of ideologies. The closer the two parties are and their positions, the more intense the candidates will compete to win the elections with the parties trying to move away from each other to carve a space for their policy space in order to win the elec tions without much repositioning. This shows that in the Downsian model, while competition may drive the candidates together, it absolutely drives the political parties apart in political competitions. In most political contests and competitions, the strategies that the candidates choose in an election campaign and what they emphasize has got a direct bearing on the vote choices and the final outcome. If the distribution of the ideologies in the society is constant, there will be an equilibrium meaning that ideologies are stable over time.