Public Choice

, Volume 77, Issue 4, pp 739–756 | Cite as

Voting behavior under the directional spatial model of electoral competition

  • Samuel MerrillIII
Article
Accepted:

Abstract

This paper contrasts voting behavior in multicandidate elections between the proximity and the directional spatial models of electoral competition. Under the traditionalproximity spatial model, a voter's utility for a candidate is a declining function of distance between their respective positions. Under thedirectional spatial model, introduced by Rabinowitz and Macdonald, utility is specified as the scalar product of the vectors representing voter and candidate. The present paper specifies and compares regions of candidate support for the two models and for several voting procedures. The degree to which each model and voting system favors extremist versus centrist candidates is assessed. It is shown that a pure directional model implies that candidates lying in the interior of the convex hull of the other candidates receive no support under the single-vote plurality procedure. A one-parameter family of mixed proximity and directional models may provide more plausible descriptions of voter behavior than either pure model.

Keywords

Scalar Product Convex Hull Public Finance Spatial Model Vote System 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Kluwer Academic Publishers 1993

Authors and Affiliations

  • Samuel MerrillIII
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of Mathematics and Computer ScienceWilkes UniversityWilkes-Barre

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