Strategic decisions under one-stage multi-candidate voting systems

Samuel Merrill

Public Choice, 1981, vol. 36, issue 1, 115-134

Abstract: We have seen that under the assumptions of this study the problem of maximizing a voter's total utility for a number of one-stage decision rules for multi-candidate elections may be specified as linear (or quadratic) programs. Potentially optimal strategies emerge as extreme points of the feasible region in the sense that no other strategies can be uniquely optimal. Categorical, approval, Borda, and z-score decision rules are all minimal in the sense that for each, the feasible region (with abstentions excepted) consists entirely of potentially uniquely optimal strategies. For each of these decision rules we have determined the optimal strategies explicitly in terms of the voter's utility function. Among the minimal voting systems studies, we argue that the voter's task of estimating his optimal strategy is least difficult under approval voting. Application of optimal strategies to the results of a thermometer scale survey suggest that the approval, Borda, and z-score decision rules can produce results very similar to one another but very different from that of categorical voting. Furthermore, for this survey, the former three systems were far less sensitive than categorical voting to the withdrawal of some of the candidates. Copyright Martinus Nijhoff Publishers bv 1981

Date: 1981
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF00163774 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:36:y:1981:i:1:p:115-134

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/BF00163774

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().