Generalized majority rules: utilitarian welfare in large but finite populations

Marco Faravelli and Priscilla Man ()
Additional contact information
Priscilla Man: University of Queensland

Economic Theory, 2021, vol. 72, issue 1, No 2, 48 pages

Abstract: Abstract Generalized majority rules are electoral rules in which an alternative needs to obtain a fixed percentage (not necessarily 50%) of all votes in order to win. While Krishna and Morgan (Am Econ J Microeconom 7:339–375, 2015) demonstrate that simple majority maximizes expected utilitarian welfare for limiting populations regardless of the prior support for the alternatives, this paper finds that, when the prior support is known, a continuum of voting rules also achieves the same welfare. Moreover, as the population approaches the limit, every voting rule eventually becomes welfare inferior to picking the ex-ante majority without an election. Examining the properties of these optimal rules allows us to generalize the relationship between voter participation and welfare beyond the symmetric case.

Keywords: Supermajority; Qualified majority; Costly voting; Voter turnout; Compulsory voting; Poisson game (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00199-020-01285-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:joecth:v:72:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s00199-020-01285-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-020-01285-x

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().