Abstract
An assumption of sincere voting for one's most preferred candidate is frequently invoked in models of electoral competition in which the elected legislature consists of more than a single candidate or party. Similarly, such an assumption is more-or-less implicit in many normative discussions of the relative merits of alternative methods for electing a representative assembly. Voters, however, have preferences over policy outcomes—which are determined by the ex post elected legislature—and not over candidates per se. This paper examines the extent to which the sincere voting assumption is legitimate in a wide class of strategic models of legislative elections. The finding is negative, and this has direct implications for the interpretation of conlusions drawn from models—formal or otherwise—which impose sincere voting as an assumption.
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This paper is a revised version of CalTech Social Science Working Paper #637, and was written while I was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Much of the paper is a result of the efforts of John Ledyard to understand what I was trying to say about the problem. I am extremely grateful for his help, and for his insistence that I look for a theorem and not simply a set of examples. I am also grateful to Kim Border for providing the structure of a proof for one of the results. Despite their imput, I retain all responsibility for any remaining errors and ambiguities.
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Austen-Smith, D. Sincere voting in models of legislative elections. Soc Choice Welfare 6, 287–299 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00446986
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00446986