Review of Economic Studies Vol. 67 No. 1 2000
Voting as Communicating
Abstract
This paper develops a model where voters trade-off two different motives when deciding how to vote: they care about current decision-making (they are “strategic”), but they also care about communicating their views about their most-preferred candidate so as to influence future elections, by influencing other voters' opinion and/or party positioning. In effect, voters in this model are intermediate between “strategic” and “sincere” voters of conventional models in elections with more than 2 candidates. This allows us to better investigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems: our main conclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoral systems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication, e.g. by opting for 2-round systems rather than 1-round systems.
- DOI
- 10.1111/1467-937x.00126
- Volume
- 67
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 169-191
- Language
- en
- Sources
- crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex