Directional and Local Electoral Competitions with Probabilistic Voting.
Abstract
This paper develops the foundations of spatial models of electoral competitions with probabilistic voting from the existing literature on this topic. We then derive necessary and sufficient conditions for: (1) directional electoral equilibria; (2) stationary electoral equilibria; and (3) local electoral equilibria. These conditions imply general existence results for such equilibria. These results are derived without using any special concavity conditions or symmetry assumptions on the distribution of voters' preferences. Additionally, they hold for any multi-dimensional policy space. This is in marked contrast to the existing results on electoral equilibria in spatial models with deterministic or probabilistic voting. The conditions derived in this paper also reveal the equivalence between elections and certain social choice mechanisms involving the social log-likelihood function. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 1980
- Accession Number
- ADA098116
Entities
People
- Peter Coughlin
- Shmuel Nitzan
Organizations
- Stanford University