This article analyzes how niche parties may utilize a strategy of policy shifting to garner additional voters. It leverages a unique opportunity in which a Costa Rican political party released two different versions of its party manifesto at different moments during a single election cycle. This rare opportunity uncovers how the party shifted from having a hard conservative stance on social issues, such as abortion, to moderating its stance and centering its focus on less contentious issues in a runoff election campaign. Understanding how a single political party may alter its strategy is important because it allows us to better gauge the effectiveness of shifting policy positions, especially for niche parties, for which a particular issue area is dominant. Moreover, this analysis opens additional avenues of research on political parties in the Latin American context, since research utilizing manifesto data in this context has been limited.

In recent decades, citizenship policies in Europe have changed significantly: some governments have introduced restrictive new requirements for citizenship, while others have made citizenship more accessible. What explains this variation? Despite a burgeoning literature on both comparative citizenship and spatial competition among parties, scholarship on this question remains in its infancy and primarily focused on the influence of the far right. Expanding on this growing research, this article argues that citizenship policy change results from electoral competition on both sides of the political spectrum, in conjunction with governments’ ideological orientation. Using new data on citizenship policies across sixteen European countries from 1975 to 2014, the author demonstrates that left-of-center governments facing increasing levels of left party competition are associated with more accessible policy changes, while increasing levels of party competition from the far right yield more restrictive policy changes under not only right-of-center governments, but also centrist and left-of-center governments as well.

Empirical applications of the spatial theory of elections typically rely on the discrete choice framework to arrive at probabilistic voting models. Whereas in the classic model voter choice is solely a function of spatial proximity, neo-Downsian models also incorporate voter-specific nonpolicy attributes, which are represented by sociodemographic characteristics. One prominent line of such probabilistic models, Schofield’s Valence Model, additionally includes party valences into voter utility functions. The model rests on the estimated party intercepts to measure the valence advantages empirically. The party intercepts are ordered based on their values, and then this valence ranking is used further to predict equilibrium locations. The paper demonstrates that this measurement strategy does not provide unique results in fully specified models due to central properties of discrete choice models and the specific nature of party intercepts in these models. Drawing on a simple example based on mass election surveys from Germany, it is shown that the valence ranking, the crucial factor to investigate how valence differences affect the nature of spatial competition, is highly sensitive to arbitrary coding decisions. As a consequence, it is impossible to represent valence with the constants and to infer something substantial from the resulting valence ranking.

We study a spatial competition model which is a variant of the celebrated Hotelling (1929) framework. One of the firm is a brick-and-mortar one while the other is on-line. Both firms sell the same product except that (constant) marginal costs may differ. Consumers going to the shop around the corner face transportation costs according to their adress whereas on-line consumers bear a fix cost that may capture technological burden and risk premium. In the pricing Nash equilibria the “new economy” firm has smaller market shares eventhough it offers more attractive prices. For the on-line firm to become a leader, the cost difference must be large enough to offset the comparative disadvantage it face on the demand side. In the long run, increasing competition ultimately forces the local firm out of downtown. We argue that this effect may be related to some of the forecasts concerning the geographical impact of the development of remote access services.

This paper provides a bird-eye overview of the history of spatial economic theory. It is organized around three main ideas (and authors): (i) land use and urban economics (Thünen), (ii) the nature of competition across space (Hotelling), and (iii) new economic geography and the emergence of economic agglomerations (Krugman).

An array of points {Z1, Z2, …, Zn–1} in the interval V = [0, L], is such that 0 ≦ Z1, ≦ Z2 ≦ … ≦ Zn–1, ≦ L. One of the points is chosen at random (Zk, say, with probability pk) and displaced to a new position within the interval [Zk–1, Zk+ 1], the position again chosen at random according to a probability distribution Gk. We derive some results concerning the limiting distribution of the array after a succession of such displacements. If Gk is a uniform distribution, it appears that the number of displacements necessary to open up a gap between at least one pair of adjacent points of size at least γ is O(ρ n), n →∞, where ρ = L/(L – γ).