Downs (1957) Flashcards
What is the area of study covered by Downs (1957)?
Downs (1957) attempts to model government decision-making processes based on the foundation that politicians are opportunistic and aim to gain office in order to extract rents.
What is the main hypothesis of Downs (1957)?
Political parties in a democracy formulate policy strictly as a means of gaining votes. They do not seek office for partisan reasons; rather, they formulate policies and serve interest groups in order to gain office.
What are the assumptions concerning voters in the Downs (1957) model?
Voters are rational and place votes in order to maximise utility knowing their choices affect others.
Describe each parties maximisation problem.
Party A: max P(gA, gB)R
Party B: max [1 - P(gA, gB)R]
Describe how Downs (1957) visualises preferences.
Downs (1957) sets a 0-100 or 1-10 left-right scale where each party is ranked and placed. This allows for spatial modelling to help show how parties converge to locations preferred by the median voter.
Briefly define political equilibrium as per Downs (1957).
The situation where no new political parties can be successfully formed and where incumbent parties face no incentives to deviate from their political location.
Briefly describe the Convergence Theorem outlined by Downs (1957).
The Convergence Theorem posits that as politicians are opportunistic the policies of parties A and B will converge to that of the decisive voter, the Median Voter. This occurs only under the assumption that all individuals have Single Peaked Preferences.
