A TOURNAMENT OF PARTY STRATEGIES James H. Fowler University of California, Davis Michael Laver New York University In the spirit of Robert Axelrod’s tournament for strategies in the repeat- play prisoner’s dilemma game, we announce a tournament for party strategies in a dynamic agent-based spatial model of party competition. The winner will receive $1000. We herewith call for submissions of party strategies by 15 April 2006. Each strategy submitted will be pitted against each other strategy in a series of long-running simulations of a two-dimensional multiparty spatial model in which the number of parties is endogenously determined. All parties falling below a certain size threshold for two consecutive elections will “die”. One new party will be “born” each election at a random spatial location, using a strategy randomly selected (with replacement) from the portfolio of submitted strategies. The strategy most successful at winning votes over the very long run will be declared the “winner”. A full version of the rules is available at http://jhfowler.ucdavis.edu/tournament.htm PLEASE NOTE: Submissions are NOT required to be in R (but they must be specified well enouigh that we can program them). Anyone may submit, including individuals outside the field of political science. Best, james and mik ********************************************************** Political Methodology E-Mail List Editor: Karen Long Jusko <[log in to unmask]> ********************************************************** Send messages to [log in to unmask] To join the list, cancel your subscription, or modify your subscription settings visit: http://polmeth.wustl.edu/polmeth.php **********************************************************