Electoral Competition with Endogenous Voter Preferences

选举竞争的空间模型由安东尼唐斯首先提出，随后被许多作者扩展，是正式政治理论的核心部分。 它过去和现在都被用来研究各种各样的选举过程和政治机构，它在许多不同条件下的性质现在是众所周知的。 然而，所有这些工作都坚持这样一个假设，即选民的偏好是外生的，在研究竞争政党和候选人的行为时可以被视为固定的。 这使得所有的预测结果都以这个假设为条件。 相比之下，对选民偏好的实证研究将偏好的变化与竞争政党和候选人的政纲和行动联系起来。 拟议的研究将通过开发一个使偏好内生的选举竞争模型来连接这两个文献，这意味着它们在选举过程中与政党平台共同演变。 然后，将探讨该模型，以确定其影响的稳定结果的存在，预测这些结果的能力的基础上的初始条件和假设的一方的行为，并为它的动态特性。 固定偏好的假设可以被视为这个一般模型的一个特例。

The spatial model of electoral competition first proposed by Anthony Downs and subsequently extended by many authors is a core part of formal political theory. It has been and is currently used to study a wide variety of electoral processes and political institutions and its properties under many alternative conditions are now well known. All of this work, however, maintains the assumption that voters' preferences are exogenously given and can be treated as fixed while studying the behavior of competing parties and candidates. This makes all the resulting predictions conditional on this assumption. Empirical studies of voter preferences, by contrast, have connected changes in preferences to the platforms and actions of competing parties and candidates. The proposed research will connect these two literatures by developing a model of electoral competition that makes preferences endogenous, meaning that they co-evolve with party platforms during the election process. The model will then be explored to ascertain its implications for the existence of stable outcomes, for the ability to predict these outcomes based on initial conditions and assumptions about party behavior, and for its dynamic properties. The assumption of fixed preferences can be treated as a special case of this general model.