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Examined are equilibria in multi- & two-party political systems. Drawing on the work of Anthony Downs (An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York: Harper & Row, 1957), a rational-choice model of governmental decision making is presented that has a one-dimensional policy space for the positions of parties & voters, & assumes an arbitrary continuous density of voters, voters for the nearest party, & parties that try to maximize the number of votes. Sufficient & necessary conditions for equilibria are given, from which it is deduced that for systems with a large number of parties, equilibria are rare unless the density of voters is uniform. 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 10 References. Adapted from the source document.