ABSTRACT
Analogies with duopoly and oligopoly theories, as these apply to certain markets for private goods, have often been used by economists to discuss competition between political parties in the public sector. Anyone venturing a public statement critical of the governing party is immediately classified as revisionist, antirevolutionary, and bourgeois. As economists have known for a long time, competition is never welcomed and is surely not something that a monopolist or a governing party would have itself foster. As Buchanan has already pointed out, these analogies carry us only part of the way, since once elected a political party is to some extent free from competition for the whole of the election period. If one is reasonably careful, it is most enlightning, without rejecting the role of potential competitors, to analyze the behavior of political parties in terms of the theory of monopoly.
