Abstract
Is there a rationale for an electoral college system or do these voting systems always waste useful information? This paper studies this question in a setup in which voting is supposed to aggregate decentralized information about individual preferences for two candidates. Individual perceptions may be affected by regional information. When such regional information plays a major role, an electoral college system may be superior to simple majority voting.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Austen-Smith D., Banks J.S. (1996) Information aggregation, rationality, and the condorcet Jury theorem. American Political Science Review 90(1): 34–45
Blair D.H. (1979) Electoral college reform and distribution of voting power. Public Choice 34(2): 201–215
Cebula R.J. (2001) The electoral college and voter participation: Evidence on two hypotheses. Atlantic Economic Journal 29: 304–310
Cebula R.J., Murphy D.R. (1980) The electoral college and voter participation rates. Public Choice 35(2): 185–190
Condorcet, M. de (1785), Essai sur l’application de l’analyse a la probabilite des decisions rendues a la probabilite des viox. De L’imprimierie royale: Paris
Doraszelski, U., Gerardi, D. and Squintani, F. (2003), Communication and voting with double-sided information, Contributions to Theoretical Economics 3(1), Article 6
Feddersen T. J., Pesendorfer W. (1996), The swing voter’s curse. American Economic Review 86(3): 408–424
Feddersen T.J., Pesendorfer W. (1997) Voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information. Econometrica 65(5): 1029–1058
Feddersen T.J., Pesendorfer W. (1999a) Abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences. American Political Science Review 93(2): 381–398
Feddersen T.J., Pesendorfer W. (1999b), Election, information aggregation and strategic voting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 96: 10572–10574
Gerardi, D. and Yariv, L. (2002), Deliberative Voting, Mimeo.
Gerling K., Grüner H.P., Kiel A., Schulte E. (2003) Decision making in committees: A survey. European Journal of Political Economy 21: 563–579
Ladha K.K. (1992) The Condorcet Jury Theorem, free speech, and correlated votes. American Journal of Political Science 36: 617–634
Lizzeri A., Persico N. (2001) The provision of public goods under alternative electoral incentives. American Economic Review 91(1): 225–239
Mukhopadhaya K. (2003) Jury size and the free rider problem. The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 19: 24–44
Persico N. (2004) Committee design with endogenous information. Review of Economic Studies 71: 165–94
Strumpf K.S., Phillippe J.R. Jr. (1999), Estimating presidential elections: The importance of state fixed effects and the role of national versus local information. Economics and Politics 11: 33–50
Young H.P. (1988) Condorcet’s theory of voting. American Political Science Review 82(4): 1231–1244
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
A previous version of this paper has appeared as CEPR Dp. No. 3371.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Behm, M., Grüner, H.P. Reliability of Information Aggregation with Regional Biases: A Note. Theory Decis 66, 355–371 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-007-9078-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11238-007-9078-7