Two's Company, Three's an Equilibrium: Strategic Voting and Multicandidate Elections

John W. Patty, James M. Snyder and Michael M. Ting

Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2009, vol. 4, issue 3, 251-278

Abstract: In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates' and voters' strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attention to subgame perfect Nash equilibria in weakly undominated strategies, the set of electoral equilibria is very large. We provide several characterizations of candidates' equilibrium platforms, including a set of conditions under which equilibrium platforms are located in the minmax set. We also examine welfare implications of the results as well as connections between the noncooperative equilibria and the uncovered set.

Keywords: Multicandidate elections; Undominated equilibrium; Spatial competition; Minmax set (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00008056

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