Voting in Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule

Niall Hughes

No 269728, Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics

Abstract: Models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen - extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when single district elections are used to fill a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter matters. An extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred to a more moderate policy by the median voter in a majority of districts. The mere existence of a centrist party can lead to moderate outcomes even if the party itself wins few seats. Furthermore, I show that while standard single district elections always have misaligned voting i.e. some voters do not vote for their preferred choice, equilibria of the legislative election exist with no misaligned voting in any district. Finally, I show that when parties are impatient, a fixed rule on how legislative bargaining occurs will lead to more coalition governments, while uncertainty will favour single party governments.

Keywords: Financial; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54
Date: 2015-12-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/269728/files/twerp_1097_hughes.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/269728/files/t ... s.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Voting in legislative elections under plurality rule (2016)
Working Paper: Voting In Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule (2015)
Working Paper: Voting In Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule (2015)
Working Paper: VOTING IN LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS UNDER PLURALITY RULE (2014)
Working Paper: Voting in Legislative Elections Under Plurality Rule (2014)
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:ags:uwarer:269728

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.269728

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().