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The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com ; We analyze a one-dimensional model of spatial political competition with two parties and uncertainty on the distribution of voters' types. We assume that parties are formed by regular members and professional politicians; members care about the policy enacted, while professional politicians, on the contrary, care only about winning the election. We consider two possibilities: that members choose the political platforms and that professional politicians are the ones who choose such platforms. The expected utility for party members is analyzed under these two cases. We find that when professional politicians have no informational advantage, it is on the interest of both parties to let professional politicians choose the platforms. Only in the case in which professional politicians have much better information than the members of the party about voters is it possible that party members obtain a greater expected utility choosing the platforms themselves rather than letting the professional politicians choose. ; I wish to acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Educacion, projects no. PB94 1504, PB93 0342, PB97 0131 and D.G.I.C.T. mobility grant ; Publicado

A one-dimensional model of spatial political competition with incomplete information is developed. It is assumed that voters care about the distribution of votes among the two candidates. Voters have an incomplete information about the distribution of voters' types. We provide conditions for which the publication of opinion polls may solve the informational problem voters face. The main result states that only when the distribution of voters is polarized we could expect that voters act as if they were fully informed.

We analyze a one-dimensional model of spatial political competition with two parties and uncertainty on the distribution of voters types. We assume that parties are formed by regular members and professional politicians; members care about the policy enacted, while professional politicians, on the contrary, only care about winning the election. We consider two possibilities: that member choose such platforms. The expected utility for party members is analyzed under these two cases. We find that when professional politicians have no informational advantage, it is on the interest of both parties to let professional politicians choose the platforms. Only in the case in which professional politicians have better information than the members of the party about voters is it possible that party members obtain a greater expected utility choosing the platforms themselves rather than letting the professional politicians choose.

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com ; A spatial model of party competition is studied in which: (i) Parties are supposed to have ideology. By this we mean that their goal is to maximize the welfare of their constituencies. (ii) The policy implemented after the election does not need to coincide with the one proposed by the winner. The policy implemented should be a compromise that considers the proposals made by the di¤erent parties. In the case of proportional representation this compromise is modeled as a convex combination of the proposed policies with weights proportional to the number of votes obtained by each party. We provide some existence theorems and compare the equilibrium in our model with the equilibrium that exists under some probabilistic models. It is also shown that proportional representation will create incentives for the parties to announce radical platforms. ; Publicado

Es un comentario de: Bowles, S.; Gintis, H. "Democratic Firms and the Distribution of Wealth", p. 243-265

A one-dimensional model of spatial political competition with endogenous party formation is developed. It is proved that at equilibrium there are only two parties. These parties propose alternatives in the extreme positions of the policy space. The adopted policy, however, is a compromise between these two extremes ; The second author wishes to acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education, projects no. PB93-0940, PB94-1504 and D.G.I.C.Y.T. mobility grant ; The first author is supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The second author wishes to acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education, projects no. PB93-0940, PB94-1504 and D.G.I.C.Y.T. mobility grant ; Publicado

We propose a two-region two-sector model of uneven development, where technological change benefits either the lagging or the leading region. In this framework interregional transfers may lead to persistent underdevelopment; by raising wages, transfers reduce the chance of the backward region adopting a new technology and taking off. Due to uncertainty about which region benefits from technological change, the backward region may rationally choose to remain underdeveloped, while the advanced region continues to pay transfers. The model provides a rationale for cases, such as Italy's Mezzogiorno, where the same rich region subsidizes the same poor region on a continuous basis. ; Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education (SEJ2005-05831), the Regional Government of Madrid (06/HSE/0157/2004) and the Fundación BBVA is gratefully acknowledged ; Publicado

This paper studies the typical European system for public funding of parties, where parties receive public funds depending on their vote share. These funds finance electoral campaigns. It is shown that such a funding system increases policy convergence. The effect is larger, the more funding depends on vote shares. If the parties have access to other means of campaign finance given in a lump-sum way, the effect is moderated. ; Ortuno-Ortin gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Education through grant CICYT PB-970131 ; Publicado

We develop a dynamic political model of dividing a fixed amount of money among n districts. There are two political parties that make proposal on such divisions and compete in each district. Each district elects a representative to a legislature. Each party is governed by its representatives who are elected to the legislature. Voters are myopic and there is a slight incumbency advantage. We show that if all districts are of the same size then they all get the same share in the long run.

We develop a model of spatial political competition with ideological parties and uncertainty. The political issue is the income tax rate and the amount of a public good. The ideology of each party is determine endogenously. We show that the tax rate does not coincide with the ideal policy of the median voter. Moreover, the tax rate is not increasing in the di¤erence between the mean income and the median income.

This paper concerns public funding of parties. Parties receive public funds depending on their vote share. Funds …nance electoral campaigns. Two cases are investigated. In the …rst some voters are policy motivated and some are "impressionable" - their vote depends directly on campaign expenditures. In the second campaigning is informative and all voters are policy motivated. Public funds increase policy convergence in both cases. The e¤ect is larger, the more funding depends on vote shares. When campaigns are informative, there may be multiple equilibria. Intuitively, a large party can stay large since it receives large funds.

Our analysis yields some conclusions about the political role of regions in the formation of supranational economic areas, which turns out to be quite di®erent from the role of nations. The claim that regions have more incentives than nations to attain a ¯scal agreement implying full economic integration is likely to be correct when nations are economic stable arrangements, i.e. when the rich region of a nation is not \exploited" by the poor region. When, on the other hand, it is not on the interest of a rich region to be part of a nation, attempts to achieve full economic integration among a group of nations is more likely to be successful if nations, instead of regions, are the decision makers.

The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.com ; We study dominant strategy mechanisms where the planner knows the distribution of types and the agents are instructed to announce their types to the planner. It is assumed that the planner has access to a technology of inspection which is costly but perfect, and that he can penalize an agent who is inspected after announcements have been made if he is found to have lied about his type. It shall be shown that, in general, the welfare-maximizing mechanism that respects minimal equity will induce some agents to lie about their types ; Publicado

This paper theoretically analyzes and empirically investigates the importance of local interaction between individuals of different linguistic groups for the provision of public goods at the national level. Depending on whether local interaction mitigates or reinforces antagonism towards other groups, the micro-founded theory we develop predicts that a country's provision of public goods (i) decreases in its overall linguistic fractionalization, and (ii) either increases or decreases in how much individuals locally learn about other groups. After constructing a 5 km by 5 km geographic dataset on language use for 223 countries, we compute measures of overall fractionalization and local learning, and investigate their relation to public good provision at the country level. While overall fractionalization worsens outcomes, we find a positive causal relation between local learning and public goods. Local mixing therefore mitigates the negative impact of a country's overall linguistic fractionalization. An IV strategy shows that this result is not driven by the possible endogenous spatial distribution of language speakers within countries. ; Gomes gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Fundación Ramón Areces, and Ortuño-Ortín thanks the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness (grant ECO2013-42710-P). We benefitted from discussions with Diego Puga and presentations at the University of Heidelberg, the 2016 10th CESIfoWorkshop on Political Economy and the 2014 British Academy Workshop on "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Peace Operations and Conflict Resolution".

We consider a linguistically diversified society and examine the notion of language disenfran-chisement when some individuals are denied the full access to documents and political process in their native tongues. To calculate the disenfranchisement indices we use the Dyen percentage cognate matrix of linguistic distances between Indo-European languages and apply survey and population data on language proficiency in the European Union. We then determine optimal sets of official languages that depend on society's sensitivity against disenfranchisement and comprehensiveness of the chosen language regime. We also discuss the language situation in the European Union after its last enlargement. ; We are grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Fundación BBVA for their financial support