ANZIAM J. 46(E) pp.C764--C785, 2005.

Optimal strategies in political elections

D. Lesmono

E. J. Tonkes
(Received 21 October 2004, revised 9 June 2005)

Abstract

In the Majoritarian Parliamentary System, the government has a constitutional right to call an early election. This right provides the government a control to achieve its objective to remain in power for as long as possible. We model the early election problem mathematically using opinion polls data as a stochastic process to proxy the government's probability of re-election. These data measure the difference in popularity between the government and the opposition. We fit a mean reverting Stochastic Differential Equation to describe the behaviour of the process and consider the possibility for the government to use other control tools, which are termed `boosts' to induce shocks to the opinion polls by making timely policy announcements or economic actions. These actions improve the government's popularity and have some impact upon the early-election exercise boundary.

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Authors

D. Lesmono
Department of Mathematics and Advanced Computational Modelling Centre, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, mailto:dlesmono@maths.uq.edu.au; and Department of Mathematics, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung, Indonesia. mailto:jdharma@home.unpar.ac.id
E. J. Tonkes
Department of Mathematics, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.

Published August 8, 2005. ISSN 1446-8735

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Copyright Austral. Mathematical Soc.; prepared August 8, 2005, from Lesm.tex with anziamje.sty (v2.3h)