Negativity Effect in Multiparty Electoral Competition

Abstract

We construct a dynamic voting model of multiparty competition in order to capture the following facts: voters base their decision on past economic performance of the parties, and parties and candidates have different objectives. This model may explain the emergence of parties' ideologies, and shows the compatibility of the different objectives of parties and candidates. Together, these results give rise to the formation of political parties, as infinetely-lived agents with a certain ideology, out of the competition of myopic candidates freely choosing policy positions. We also show that in multicandidate elections held under the plurality system, Hotelling's principle of minimum differentiation is no longer satisfied.