IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hol/holodi/0306.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Comparing Electoral Systems: A Geometric Analysis

Author

Abstract

This paper constructs a game-theoretic model of elections in alternative electoral systems with three or four candidates. Each electoral system specifies how the platforms of the candidates and their scores give rise to an outcome. When geometrical analysis shows that two outcomes can compete against each other for victory, a pivot probability is associated to that pair. Each voter is rational and picks the candidate that maximizes her expected utility, which results from the balancing of her preferences and beliefs about the pivot-probabilities. Candidate positioning is endogenous and the result of a Nash game. The possible equilibria are computed for plurality and runoff majority systems.

Suggested Citation

  • Anouk Riviere, 2003. "Comparing Electoral Systems: A Geometric Analysis," Royal Holloway, University of London: Discussion Papers in Economics 03/6, Department of Economics, Royal Holloway University of London, revised Dec 2003.
    • Handle: RePEc:hol:holodi:0306
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/economics/Research/WorkingPapers/pdf/dpe0306.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jeffrey O’Neill, 2007. "Choosing a runoff election threshold," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 131(3), pages 351-364, June.
    2. Jorge Gonzalez Suitt & Axel Guyon & Thibault Hennion & Rida Laraki & Xavier Starkloff & Sophie Thibault & Benjamin Favreau, 2014. "Vers un système de vote plus juste ?," Working Papers hal-01061100, HAL.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    electoral system; outcome simplex; strategic voting; pivot probability; positional equilibrium; runoff system; median voter theorem.;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hol:holodi:0306. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Claire Blackman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/economics/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.