Essays on Political Parties, their Organization, and Policy Choice By

The primary aim of this thesis is to advance economics ’ understanding of the organization of political parties, for the purpose of explaining the policy choices that result from collective decision procedures. Motivating this inquiry is the benign neglect that the political party as an organization has long suffered from in economics, in a manner that mirrors depictions of the firm in early neoclassical analysis. Accordingly, this thesis first considers the question of the relative influence of different contributors to the political parties ’ electoral activities, i.e. special-interest groups contribut-ing money and individual party activists volunteering their time, on their choice of policy platforms. It is found that the presence of activists induces parties to offer differentiated policy platforms, even in the presence of a special-interest group whose contributions are perfectly substitutable with those of activists. Concurrently, the special interest’s influence is to bias the parties ’ platforms towards its preferred policy. Second, the internal dynamics of parties organized into factions sharing common goals are investigated. It is studied how they affect the party leader’s choice of policies while i