Simultaneous elections in a polarized society make single-party sweeps more likely

Pradeep Dubey and Siddhartha Sahi

Department of Economics Working Papers from Stony Brook University, Department of Economics

Abstract: In a country with multiple elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold some or all of them on a common polling date. We show that in a polarized society, where each voter has a preferred party, such a decision will bring about a systemic change at the political level: an increase in the simultaneity of polling will increase the likelihood of a single-party sweep, namely, that a single party wins all the elections. Our result holds under fairly general conditions and we discuss its applicability to the two most common real world electoral systems, namely first-past-thepost (most voters) and party list proportional representation (most countries). In the course of our analysis, we obtain a generalization of the well-known Harris correlation inequality.

Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nys:sunysb:25-01

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