Stability and Coordination in Duverger's Law: A Formal Model of Preelection Polls and Strategic Voting

Mark Fey

American Political Science Review, 1997, vol. 91, issue 1, 135-147

Abstract: This paper investigates the dynamics of the “wasted vote” phenomenon and Duverger's Law. I construct a theoretical model in order to consider how preelection polls serve to inform the electorate about the relative chances of the candidates and how that information acts over time to decrease the support of the trailing candidate. The results shed light on how public opinion polls can aggregate information in the electorate and coordinate voters on the viable candidates in the election. Specifically, I show that in a Bayesian game model of strategic voting there exist non-Duvergerian equilibria in which all three candidates receive votes (in the limit). These equilibria require extreme coordination, however, and any variation in beliefs leads voters away from them to one of the Duvergerian equilibria. Thus, non-Duvergerian equilibria are unstable, while two-party equilibria are not. In addition, I describe how preelection polls provide information to voters about the viability of candidates and can thus be used by voters to coordinate on a Duvergerian outcome.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (43)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:apsrev:v:91:y:1997:i:01:p:135-147_23

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().