THE ROLE OF PARTY REPUTATION IN THE FORMATION OF POLICY

This paper shows that a party can credibly establish a platform more moderate than the ideology of its members and thereby raise the probability that the party's nominee wins the election. A lame duck incumbent optimally implements his party's platform in order to maintain his party's reputation for having a moderate platform. This increases the likelihood that his party retains power. When candidates credibly locate themselves in policy space via this mechanism, we show that if candidates are sufficiently impatient, then their policies are bounded away from one another. The policy convergence result is not robust.