Abstract
One of the important lessons to take away from Rohit Parikh’s impressive body of work is that logicians and computer scientists have much to gain by focusing their attention on the intricacies of political campaigns. Drawing on recent work developing a theory of expressive voting, we study the dynamics of voters’ opinions during an election. In this paper, we develop a model in which the relative importance of the different issues that concern a voter may change either in response to candidates’ statements during a campaign or due to unforeseen events. We study how changes in a voter?s attention to the issues influence voting behavior under voting systems such as plurality rule and approval voting. We argue that it can be worthwhile for candidates to reshape public focus, but that doing so can be a complex and risky activity.
All errors in government and in society are based on philosophic errors which in turn are derived from errors in natural science.
Marquis de Condorcet (This quote of Condorcet is taken from the recent book Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone [2008, p. 134.])
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Notes
- 1.
Dean and Parikh normalize the weight function so that \(\sum _{p\in \mathsf {At}} w_i(p)=1\). This simplification is not needed for this paper.
- 2.
This model is not only interesting for the theoretician. There are websites, such as www.isidewith.com, that use a variant of this model to rank candidates in upcoming elections according to how close they are to the voter’s opinions about a number of relevant policy issues.
- 3.
See, also, Brennan and Lomasky (1993, pp. 40–46) for a discussion of this point.
- 4.
For instance, the motivation to misrepresent one’s position ceases altogether.
- 5.
Thus, a voter’s choice to abstain is due to an inability to express herself in the voting system rather than any cost associated with voting.
- 6.
The voter randomly selects a candidate if there is more than one such candidate.
- 7.
Some people claim that a significant number of voters originally based their decision on a fifth issue \(i_5\): “This party has been in office for the last 40 years”. We do not wish to comment on this claim here. We note, however, that our framework is rich enough to incorporate such considerations.
- 8.
Of course, this is not the only way to represent a change in focus. In general, any transformation (not necessarily linear) on the space of voters’ positions can be used to describe a shift of focus during a campaign. A very interesting direction for future research is to explore these different modeling choices.
- 9.
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Klein, D., Pacuit, E. (2017). Focusing on Campaigns. In: Başkent, C., Moss, L., Ramanujam, R. (eds) Rohit Parikh on Logic, Language and Society. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47843-2_5
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