Majority Runoff Elections: Strategic Voting and Duverger's Hypothesis

Laurent Bouton and Gabriele Gratton

No 2013-23, Discussion Papers from School of Economics, The University of New South Wales

Abstract: The majority runoff system is widely used around the world. Yet, our understanding of its properties and of voters’ behavior is limited. In this paper, we fully characterize the set of strictly perfect voting equilibria in large three-candidate majority runoff elections. Considering all possible distributions of preference orderings and intensities, we prove that only two types of equilibria can exist. First, there are always equilibria in which only two candidates receive votes. Second, there may exist an equilibrium in which three candidates receive votes. Its characteristics challenge common beliefs: (i) neither sincere voting by all voters, nor push over tactics (i.e. supporters of the front-runner voting for a less-preferred candidate in order to in?uence who will face the front-runner in the second round) are supported in equilibrium, and (ii) the winner does not necessarily have democratic legitimacy since the Condorcet winner may not even participate in the second round.

Keywords: Strategic Voting; Runoff Elections; Poisson Games (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2013-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://research.economics.unsw.edu.au/RePEc/papers/2013-23.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity

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:swe:wpaper:2013-23

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from School of Economics, The University of New South Wales Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Hongyi Li ().