Voting in Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule

Niall Hughes

The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics

Abstract: Conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen - extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when when single district elections are used to fill a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters. An extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred by the median voter in a majority of districts, while the mere existence of a centrist party can lead to moderate outcomes even if the party itself wins few seats. Furthermore, I show that while standard single district elections always have misaligned voting i.e. some voters do not vote for their preferred choice, equilibria of the legislative election exist with no misaligned voting in any district. Finally, I show that when parties are impatient, a fixed rule on how legislative bargaining occurs will lead to more coalition governments, while uncertainty will favour single party governments. JEL classification: C71; C72; D71; D72; D78

Keywords: Strategic Voting; Legislative Elections; Duverger’s Law; Plurality Rule; Polarization; Poisson Games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/w ... werp_1055_hughes.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Voting in legislative elections under plurality rule (2016)
Working Paper: Voting in Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule (2015)
Working Paper: Voting In Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule (2015)
Working Paper: Voting In Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule (2015)
Working Paper: VOTING IN LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS UNDER PLURALITY RULE (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wrk:warwec:1055

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) from University of Warwick, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Margaret Nash ().