We investigate whether letting people vote for multiple candidates would yield policy moderation. We do so in a setting that takes three key features of elections into account, namely, strategic voting, endogenous candidacy and policy motivation on the part of the candidates. We consider two classes of voting rules. One class consists of the voting rules where each voter casts several equally-weighed votes for the different candidates. The other class consists of the voting rules where each voter rank-orders the candidates. We identify conditions under which these voting rules yield policy moderation. We also show that these voting rules may yield policy extremism instead of policy moderation if one (or several) of the conditions is not satisfied! Finally, we find that amongst these voting rules the extent of policy moderation is maximal under the Borda Count if we consider only equilibria where all candidates are serious contenders. However, this result does not carry over to spoiler equilibria, where Approval Voting can yield more moderate policy outcomes than the Borda Count.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 144 (2009) Issue (Month): 2 (March) Pages: 772-801 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF
Did you know? All full texts are decentralized with the publishers, none reside on this server, thus making it possible to offer this service for free to all parties.