Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Author-Name: Marcin Dziubinski Author-Name-First: Marcin Author-Name-Last: Dziubinski Author-Name: Jaideep Roy Author-Name-First: Jaideep Author-Name-Last: Roy Title: Electoral Competition in 2-Dimensional Ideology Space with Unidimensional Commitment Abstract: We study a model of political competition between two candidates with two orthogonal issues, where candidates are office motivated and committed to a particular position in one of the dimensions, while having the freedom to select (credibly) any position on the other dimension. We analyse two settings: a homogeneous one, where both candidates are committed to the same dimension and a heterogeneous one, where each candidate is committed to a different dimension. We characterise and give necessary and suffcient conditions for existence of convergent and divergent Nash equilibria for distributions with a non-empty and an empty core. We identify a special point in the ideology space which we call a strict median, existence of which is strictly related to existence of divergent Nash equilibria. A central conclusion of our analysis is that for divergent equilibria, strong extremism (or differentiation) seems to be an important equilibrium feature. Creation-Date: 2009 File-URL: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/media/lancaster-university/content-assets/documents/lums/economics/working-papers/ElectoralCompetition.pdf File-Format: application/pdf Number: 598693 Classification-JEL: Keywords: Spatial Voting, Two Issues, Uni-Dimensional Commitment, StrictMedian, Extremism Handle: RePEc:lan:wpaper:598693