Non-converging Policy Competition under Agenda Control

Abstract

The electoral competition takes two steps in real world. The first stage is policy suggestion stage, and the second stage is advertisement or agenda control stage. Since the forward looking behavior about the advertisement affects to the policy platform suggestion stage, the agenda control possibility should be incorporated. I incorporated the two stages in a three-dimensional policy space. In the model, parties try to sway relative issue salience weight through advertisement efforts with an intention to maximize expected vote-share. The agenda control possibility results in a non-converging policy suggestion decision in the first stage. This divergent result is congruent with the recent empirical research on the electoral competition and campaign spending.