ECONOMY

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the plurality rule single-member district systems create an incentive for two-party or
two-candidate elections.
Candidate preferences. Theresolutiontotheparadoxesofrationality,Ihavesuggested,
is to treat voting as consumption. People like to vote, and they are motivated
to choose the candidate who is in their judgement the best alternative rather than to
maximize the returns to voting. It is reasonable to project the same motivations to
politicians. Wittman (1983) shows that if candidates have policy preferences and seek
office to get their preferences implemented, then competing candidates will offer
divergent positions. See also Besley and Coate’s (1997) citizen-candidate model.
The labor market for politicians may sustain the expression of candidate preferences
in electoral competition. The labor market for politics is hierarchical—those in
higher positions typically started their political careers in local offices, such as school
committees. Local posts are usually part-time or volunteer jobs. The appeal of such
posts is the ability to make a difference in the community, rather than the pay. Those
who get involved in local government, then, are motivated at first by ideological or
“consumption” benefits, rather than by the value of office.
At higher levels of government most elected officials (federal and state legislators
and statewide officers) are attorneys and businessmen. They are not compensated
well in most democracies compared with their professional opportunities. In order to
sustain such a pool of high-quality candidates, it may be the case that these politicians
need non-monetary compensation in order to stay involved in politics. Voters may be
willing to tolerate some extremism in order to get more professional people in office.
One objection to this account is that since anyone can run, a citizen near the
median will run for office and win. A centrist has a clear incentive to enter the political
arena if the sitting politician is an extremist: the centrist will surely win. Even if the
median voter does not run, successive elections will choose candidates increasingly
close to the median. So the median is the limit to a sequence of elections.
Ideological candidates may be sustained through the candidate selection process.
In most democracies candidates are selected through party organizations or legislative
caucuses. Those organizations may wish to select candidates consistent with a
particular ideology. For example, unions in the United Kingdom have considerable
influence on the nomination of candidates for Parliament under the Labour Party
label. In the United States, primary elections tend to screen candidates. Primary
electorates are drawn from the liberal and conservative segments of the ideological
spectrum, and moderates have a very difficult time emerging from this process
(Aldrich 1980). Those doing the nominating may not wish to trade off ideology for
winning, especially if the circumstances of a given election favor the opposing party.
Political parties’ platform choices. Downs assumed that political parties are teams—
groups of individuals working for a common goal. The individual’s utilities within a
party are the same and the same as the party’s. Most of the subsequent research has
maintained this assumption. Cox (1996), for example, uses interchangeably parties
and candidates.
Politicians within a party do not have identical interests. If one assumes that
candidates simply seek to win their own seat, each politician will want the party’s