form reserved. Candidate Positioning and Entry in a Political Competition

I first show that if there are more than two potential candidates in the Hotelling– Downs model of the simultaneous choice of positions by politicians then an equilibrium fails to exist in a wide range of situations. Subsequently I study a temporal model in which candidates are free to act whenever they wish. For the case of three potential candidates I find that in every equilibrium exactly one candidate enters. There is always an equilibrium in which the position cho-sen by the entrant is the median; the only other possibility is that the position chosen is far from the median. Journal of Economic Literature Classificatio