Spatial Models of Candidate Competition and the 1988 French Presidential Election: Are Presidential Candidates Vote-Maximizers?

Abstract

Existing applications of spatial modeling to historical elections suggest that parties rarely maximize votes. This complicates the analyst's task because explanations of party behavior must incorporate, in addition to vote-seeking motivations, such factors as the parties' calculations concerning postelection coalition negotiations. We argue that candidates in national presidential elections have greater incentives to single-mindedly seek votes than do political parties, and we refine this argument by developing two additional hypotheses: competitive candidates are more likely to be vote-maximizers than are noncompetitive candidates, and candidates are most likely to be vote-maximizing on issues highly salient to voters. Based on data from Pierce's (1996) French Presidential Election Survey, 1988, we fit a conditional logit model that incorporates voters' party identifications and sociodemographic characteristics and use its parameters to determine the vote-maximizing locations for the major candidates. Ou...