We study a model of political competition between two candidates with two
orthogonal issues, where candidates are office motivated and committed to a
particular position in one of the dimensions, while having the freedom to select
(credibly) any position on the other dimension. We analyse two settings: a
homogeneous one, where both candidates are committed to the same dimension
and a heterogeneous one, where each candidate is committed to a different
dimension. We characterise and give necessary and suffcient conditions for
existence of convergent and divergent Nash equilibria for distributions with a
non-empty and an empty core. We identify a special point in the ideology
space which we call a strict median, existence of which is strictly related to
existence of divergent Nash equilibria. A central conclusion of our analysis is
that for divergent equilibria, strong extremism (or differentiation) seems to be
an important equilibrium feature.