EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

A Better Cycle-Breaker for Swiss Democracy?

Hans Gersbach, Rodrigo Casado Noguerales and Samuel Schenk

No 11265, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: When a counter-proposal is made to an initiative to change the Swiss constitution, the citizenry makes three binary majority choices: the initiative versus the status quo, the initiative versus the counter-proposal, and the status quo versus the counterproposal as a tie-breaker. If there is a cycle, the alternative that beats the status-quo wins. This system invites strategic voting, as exemplified by the 2010 case of the “Ausschaffungsinitiative”. We suggest to break cycles differently by choosing the middle alternative in case of a cycle, which will normally be the counter-proposal. More precisely, we show that there always exists a strong Nash equilibrium in which all citizens vote sincerely. Moreover, the outcome of all alternative strong equilibria with strategic voting is the same as if everybody votes sincerely. We also show that other common cycle-breaker rules cannot achieve the same result.

Keywords: Swiss democracy; three-way referendum; Condorcet Winner; manipulation; information sharing; initiative (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D70 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11265.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:ces:ceswps:_11265

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe (wohlrabe@ifo.de).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11265