Is the Status Quo Relevant in a Representative Democracy?

Abstract

This work studies the effect of the value of the status quo in the candidates’ decisions and policy outcomes in a representative democracy with endogenous candidates. Following the citizen-candidate model due to Besley and Coate (1997) we show, for a unidimensional policy issue and for both an odd and even number of citizens, that some equilibria only hold for certain values of the status quo policy. In particular we find that a moderate status quo rules out equilibrium outcomes in which there is an uncontested candidate and that two-candidate equilibria exist more generally when the number of citizens is even.