Simultaneous elections make single-party sweeps more likely

Pradeep Dubey and Siddhartha Sahi

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Abstract: In a country with multiple elections, it may be expedient to hold some or all of them on a common polling date. Our main result, Theorem C, is that under certain assumptions, an increase in the simultaneity of polling increases the likelihood of a sweep, i.e. the likelihood that a single party wins all the elections. We discuss the applicability of our result to the two most common real world electoral systems, namely first-past-the-post (most voters, including US and India) and party list proportional representation (most countries). We deduce Theorem C from a certain inequality proved in Theorem D, which is of independent interest. In particular, we connect our inequality to the Harris correlation inequality, which is a multivariate generalization of the Chebyshev sum inequality, and plays an important role in statistical mechanics and graph theory. More precisely, we show that Theorem D also implies Theorem F, which extends the domain of the Harris inequality to a larger class of functions.

Date: 2025-03
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