In previous chapters, we have largely pushed collective action and institutional change to the background. In this chapter we explore the ability of citizens to force a regime change through coordinated action. We also consider the possibility that political elites respond to the threat of collective action by changing institutions on their own.

We begin our study of formal models of domestic politics with elections. This chapter explores electoral competition when voting behavior is deterministic; the following chapter considers electoral competition under uncertainty.

Formal models of electoral competition provide a lens through which to examine the positioning of candidates in democratic elections. Consider, for example, the onetime assertion that there is little substantive difference in the platforms of the United States’ two major political parties (e.g., American Political Science Association, 1950). The economist Harold Hotelling was the first to offer a theoretical explanation for such behavior (Hotelling, 1929). Parties, Hotelling argued, choose positions along a left–right continuum (an example of a policy space), much as gas stations or drug stores choose a location along Main Street. When there are two parties, the logic of political competition compels each to adopt a position in the center of the ideological spectrum, just as we often observe gas stations located across the street from each other in the center of town. Anthony Downs popularized and extended Hotelling’s argument in An Economic Theory of Democracy (Downs, 1957).

In previous chapters, we have either considered models of democratic politics or, as with theories of lobbying or veto players, models that can be interpreted as applying to diverse institutional settings. In this chapter, we turn to authoritarian politics.

Many of the models we have considered in previous chapters focus implicitly on the construction of coalitions in support of particular policies. In models of electoral competition, for example, parties or candidates seek the support of majority coalitions among the electorate. In contrast, in models of veto players, an agenda setter endeavors to assemble a unanimity coalition among political actors with the power to block change from the status quo.

In this chapter we return to electoral competition, but we shift focus from elections as a mechanism for aggregating individual preferences to elections as a means of holding officeholders accountable to voters. The literature on political agency that we survey here has its roots in the economic theory of contracts, where the central question is how contracts govern the relationship between principals (e.g., employers or shareholders) and their agents (e.g., employees or CEOs). In models of political agency, voters play the role of principals; their agent is a politician elected to govern on their behalf.

All of the models we have considered so far implicitly assume a single policy-maker. However, in many political environments policy can be changed only with the agreement of multiple actors. Such actors—those with the ability to block any change from the status quo—are known as veto players. Veto players might derive their power from a country’s constitution, as when the constitution dictates that policy cannot be changed without the agreement of the parliament and the president. Alternatively, they might arise endogenously through the political process. Parties that join a governing coalition, for example, typically acquire a veto over policy change.