A Dodgson-Hare synthesis

James Green-Armytage ()
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James Green-Armytage: State of New Jersey

Constitutional Political Economy, 2023, vol. 34, issue 3, No 15, 458-470

Abstract: Abstract In 1876, Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proposed a committee election procedure that chooses the Condorcet winner when one exists and otherwise eliminates candidates outside the Smith set, then allows for re-votes until a Condorcet winner emerges. The present paper discusses Dodgson’s work in the context of strategic election behavior and suggests a “Dodgson-Hare” method: a variation on Dodgson’s procedure, for use in public elections. This method allows for candidate withdrawal and employs Hare’s plurality-loser-elimination method to resolve persistent cycles. Given plausible assumptions about how candidates decide whether to withdraw when there is a cycle, Dodgson-Hare outperforms Hare, Condorcet-Hare, and 12 other voting rules in a series of spatial-model simulations that count how often each rule is vulnerable to coalitional manipulation. In the case of a one-dimensional spatial model, all coalitional voting strategies that are possible under Condorcet-Hare can be undone in Dodgson-Hare, by the withdrawal of candidates who have incentive to withdraw.

Keywords: Voting rules; Dodgson; Hare; Condorcet; Borda; Plurality; Approval (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1007/s10602-023-09392-2

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