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Welcome to the home page of the project on multi-party competition. This project developed out of interest in the question of what will happen when we relax the restrictive assumptions that give rise to the famous "Median Voter Result" in political science.
Thomas Plümper and Christian Martin pursued this question using a combination of agent based computer simulation techniques and statistical methods. On this page, you can download an interactive version of the simulation.

Before downloading and using the sumulation, please note the following important points:

• We assume no responsibility whatsoever for anything the simulation will do to your computer.
• You are free to use the simulation for fun, research, and for educational purposes. No permission is granted by the copyright owners for commercial usage.
• At this point, the program is only available for Windows. It should run fine on anything above Windows 98.
• The simulation should be understood as an illustrative device - it is not the "real" thing that we are using in our research.

Usage:

• The simulation comes as a standalone application; simply download and run it.
• Once the program is up and running, you can create up to seven political parties in either a one- or a two-dimensional policy space. Initially, these parties are at randomly assigned positions in the policy space.
• In the one-dimensional case, you will notice a histogram together with a vertical line. The histogram depicts the distribution of voters' preferences, while the line is the mean of voters' preferences. These preferences are drawn from a normal distribution.
• In the two-dimensional setup, there are two lines, roughly dividing the policy space. Again, these are the means of voters' preferences.
• Now click and hold one party, moving it around. Check the bottom panel to see what happens.
• Let parties find their optimum positions, given the positions of their competitors - click on the button "Show best position for party..."
• Once you have figured out how partisan competition works: Go out, get elected, save the world ;-)

If you are interested further, please refer to our following papers:

• Thomas Plümper/Christian W. Martin, 2008, 'Multi-Party Competition. A Computational Model with Abstention and Memory', Electoral Studies, forthcoming.
• Martin, Christian W./Plümper, Thomas, 2006, 'Instabilität von parteipolitischen Programmen: Der Einfluss der Zahl der Parteien'. In: Bräuninger, Thomas/Behnke, Joachim (eds.), Jahrbuch für Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie Band 4, Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 135-150.
• Martin, Christian W./Plümper, Thomas, 2005, 'Number of Parties, Endogenous Partisan Preferences, and Electoral Turnout Rates: A Stochastic Equilibrium Analysis', Social Science Computer Review, 23, 347-359.
• Martin, Christian W./Plümper, Thomas, 2004, 'Stammwähler und die opportunistische Wahl parteipolitischer Programme', Swiss Political Science Review, 10, 1-31.

Questions? Comments? Please contact us.