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We incorporate the media priming effects to explain how politicians can affect voters preferences on issues during the political campaign. We adapt well-known terms of international trade, such as absolute advantage and comparative advantage, to the context of parties' competition in political issues. We show that when either each party has an absolute advantage on a different issue or when parties have high comparative advantage on a different issue, the political campaign will consist of issue-emphasis divergence. However, when a party has an absolute advantage on both issues but the parties' comparative advantage is not high enough, the political campaign will consist of issue engagement or dialogue. Our results conciliate two separated theories concerning whether there must be dialogue or issue-emphasis divergence in the political campaign.

We incorporate the media priming effects to explain how politicians can affect voters preferences on issues during the political campaign. We adapt well-known terms of international trade, such as absolute advantage and comparative advantage, to the context of parties' competition in political issues. We show that when either each party has an absolute advantage on a different issue or when parties have high comparative advantage on a different issue, the political campaign will consist of issue-emphasis divergence. However, when a party has an absolute advantage on both issues but the parties' comparative advantage is not high enough, the political campaign will consist of issue engagement or dialogue. Our results conciliate two separated theories concerning whether there must be dialogue or issue-emphasis divergence in the political campaign.

The top-two primary recently approved in several states in the U.S. eliminates the closed party primaries and creates instead a single ballot in which the Örst and second place winners pass to the general election. We conduct a theoretical analysis to compare the electoral consequences of the top-two primary with those of the closed primaries. Each primary procedure induces a sequential game with three stages: candidate-entry stage, primary election, and general election. We analyze the equilibria of these games and show that the top-two primary contributes to political moderation. In particular, when the median voter is an extremist, the closed primaries always generate an extreme winner and yet the top-two primary can generate an equilibrium with a moderate winner. Further- more, when the median voter is a moderate but his/her partyís median partisan is an extremist (and some additional mild conditions hold), the closed primaries always generate an extreme winner while the top-two primary always generates a moderate winner. We also show that the top-two primary may increase the number of swing states since, in certain cases, the party-affiliation of the winner under the top-two primary may not coincide with the party affiliation of the median voter