1. The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideology
Anthony Downs Ch. 8
The Statics and Dynamics of Party Ideology

2. Learning Objectives
Evaluate how people develop political opinions and how this impacts their political behavior.
Understand the decision making process for why people vote as they do and how this changes over time.

3. Party Movement When do parties change ideologies When do the diverge?
When do they resemble each other

4. Where To Build a Bar in Central Texas?
Here… in Bastrop

5. Or Here?
6th Street

6. Why Do you See These two across the Street From Each Other?

7. Why Does This, Appear next to This?

8. Why Do We Have?

9. These Strategies Apply to Politics

10. Lets Apply this to Ideology
Here is a distribution with 0 representing policy liberalism, and 100 representing policy conservativism
A and B represent political parties

11. Where Parties Should Go in A Normal Distribution
They Move To the Center

12. Why go to the Center You Cant leapfrog the other party More voters
At what point do you stop moving to the Center?

13. When do you stop?

14. The Problem of Being Too Moderate
A Third Party could grab your flank
Too many of your people stay home

15. Staying Put

16. What About A Bimodal Distribution?

17. Party Polarization

18. The Tea Party

19. One Hump is often Bigger 2010

20. In 2008 it was the other way

21. Multi Party Systems

22. Polygamy

23. A polymodal System

24. A Polymodal System In PR systems, 1 party for Each hump
How might this differ in a Single Member District System?

25. In Germany

26. Party Movement in Multiparty Systems
Stay Put!
Distinguish yourself from your enemies

27. How our Parties Deal with the Humps
Social and Economic Conservatives (within the GOP)
The Many Humps within the Democratic Party

28. New and Old
How Many parties

29. How Many Parties in Majority Elections
Duverger’s Law
Mechanical Effect
Psychological Effect

30. How Many in a Two Round System
If No candidate gets 50%+1, we have a runoff
This system encourages multiple candidates/parties as well as coalitions

31. What about in Texas?

32. The Kinds of Candidates
Those who are there to win
Perry
KBH
Those that are there to influence
Medina
The rest
This system encourages populist and extremist candidates

33. Voting in the First Round
Try to get your preferred candidate into second place or Get them 50%
Do not worry about switching candidates

34. The Second Round
Round 1 winners must compromise to get the supporters of the losing candidates in round two
This favors candidates who are situated at the political middle
This hurts intransigent candidates

35. Rational Voting in this system
Round 1 with your heart
Round 2 with your head

36. How many parties in a PR system
As many parties as humps exist
Depends on the threshold

37. New Parties

38. Getting New Parties Existing parties cant jump over each other
New Parties come from
Between the gap
On the fringe

39. What New parties Want to Do
Win elections
Threaten Existing Parties

40. How can Third Parties Win?
A Shift In Franchise…. The electorate changes!

41. Splitting the Vote

42. Ambiguity You can try to accomplish everything
It increases your appeal
It makes it harder for the voter to be rational!
Why?