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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Incomplete information, proportional representation and strategic voting
AU - Troumpounis, Orestis
AU - Xefteris, Dimitrios
N1 - The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00355-016-0995-7
PY - 2016/12
Y1 - 2016/12
N2 - We introduce incomplete information to a multiparty election under proportional representation: each voter knows her preferences and votes strategically to maximize her payoffs, but is uncertain about the number and the preferences of the other voters. Parties are assumed to be purely office motivated and, hence, the resulting governments are always minimum winning. In this framework we prove a) generic existence of equilibria where only two parties receive a positive fraction of the votes and therefore lead to single-party governments and b) generic inexistence of equilibria that lead to coalition governments. That is, contrary to common wisdom, a proportional rule is found not to promote sincere voting and to be favorable towards single-party governments. The existence of two-party equilibria that lead to single-party governments is robust to parties having ideological concerns.
AB - We introduce incomplete information to a multiparty election under proportional representation: each voter knows her preferences and votes strategically to maximize her payoffs, but is uncertain about the number and the preferences of the other voters. Parties are assumed to be purely office motivated and, hence, the resulting governments are always minimum winning. In this framework we prove a) generic existence of equilibria where only two parties receive a positive fraction of the votes and therefore lead to single-party governments and b) generic inexistence of equilibria that lead to coalition governments. That is, contrary to common wisdom, a proportional rule is found not to promote sincere voting and to be favorable towards single-party governments. The existence of two-party equilibria that lead to single-party governments is robust to parties having ideological concerns.
KW - Proportional Elections
KW - Strategic Voters
KW - Incomplete Information
KW - Duverger’s Hypothesis
KW - Poisson Games
KW - Gamson’s Law
U2 - 10.1007/s00355-016-0995-7
DO - 10.1007/s00355-016-0995-7
M3 - Journal article
VL - 47
SP - 879
EP - 903
JO - Social Choice and Welfare
JF - Social Choice and Welfare
SN - 0176-1714
IS - 4
ER -