2. Dan Bernhardt's presentation is based on a paper of the same title, coauthored with Sangita Dubey (Government of Canada) and Eric Hughson (Colorado):

We develop a dynamic model of democratic politics in which both potential office-holders and the electorate have heterogeneous ideologies. Voters have incomplete information about candidate ideologies, so they must use information from previous positions taken in office to make informed re-election decisions. We characterize the effects of term limits and legislator compensation on the evolution over time of the ideological positions taken by office-holders and derive the implications for voter choice and welfare. Contributions of our paper include:

1. We detail how pork provision by more senior incumbents interacts with term limits to affect electoral outcomes. Pork provision - transfers of resources from districts with junior legislators to districts with more senior legislators - induces voters to be more forgiving of extreme location by incumbents, especially incumbents in small or poor districts. Pork provision can explain why re-election probabilities in Congress exceed those for governors.

(a) Term limits reduce voter welfare when all that matters are the ideological positions taken by the office-holder.

(b) Term limits may be advantageous when senior incumbents can extract benefits for their constituencies at the expense of districts with more junior representatives. Large or rich districts especially value term limits when there is substantial pork.

2. We characterize the welfare of all voters, not just the median voter.

3. We derive how the method of selecting challenging candidates - at large versus party selection - affects electoral outcomes. If voters are increasingly averse to distant location by candidates, the median voter may not be decisive. Then, the imprimateur that a party places on its representative offers voters with extreme ideologies valuable reassurance.

4. Voters disagree about how much to pay legislators. Voters with more extreme ideologies prefer to pay legislators less. If pay is too high, only some incumbents who locate at the median are re-elected.

3. Tom Palfrey's presentation is based on a paper of the same title, coauthored with Enriqueta Aragones (Harvard and Pompeu Fabra):

The paper examines competition in the standard one-dimensional Downsian model of two-candidate elections, but where one candidate (A) enjoys an advantage over the other candidate (D). Voter preferences are Euclidean, but any voter will vote for candidate A unless D is closer to her ideal point by some fixed distance d. The location of the median voter's ideal point is uncertain and its distribution is commonly known by both candidates. The candidates simultaneously choose locations to maximize the probability of victory. Pure strategy equilibria often fail to exist in this model, except under special conditions about d and the distribution of the median ideal point. We solve for the essentially unique symmetric mixed equilibrium, show that candidate A adopts more moderate policies than candidate D, and obtain some comparative statics results about the probability of victory and the expected distance between the two candidates' policies.

4. This presentation is a joint effort:

Martin Osborne will introduce the topic by discussing his conjecture about a sequential entry game in a unidimensional space. In his model, candidates sequentially pick a position or choose to stay out of the race. If candidates prefer to enter the competition only if they have some chance of winning, the conjecture is that the unique subgame perfect equilibrium of the game is for the first and last players to enter the race at the median and for all other candidates to stay out. More details on this are available at the following website: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~osborne/research/CONJECT.HTM

Mark Fey examines the issue by looking at a related model in his paper ``Sequential Action in Spatial Competition.'' In this model, candidates do not have the choice to stay out of the race - all players must choose positions in the policy space. The subgame perfect equilibrium of the model is characterized and in doing so some technical issues are addressed. A main feature of the analysis is a comparison of the sequential entry results to the simultaneous decision outcomes of previous models.

5. Steve Coate's presentation is based on a paper of the same title, coauthored with Tim Besley (LSE).

In the context of a simple model of political competition, this paper identifies three distinct reasons why policy outcomes in representative democracies can be non-majoritarian. Each explanation relies on the fact that elected policy-makers are responsible for deciding on a bundle of policy issues. The paper then goes on to investigate the constitutional tool of citizen initiatives as a way of restoring majoritarian outcomes. Initiatives can be successful in this regard because they permit the unbundling of specific policy issues.