IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/apsrev/v65y1971i04p1141-1145_13.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Pareto Optimality in Electoral Competition

Author

Listed:
  • Ordeshook, Peter C.

Abstract

The core of welfare economics consists of the proof that, for certain classes of goods, perfectly competitive markets are efficient in that they provide Pareto optimal allocations of these goods. In this paper, the efficiency of competitive elections is examined. Elections are modeled as two-candidate zero-sum games, and three kinds of equilibria for such games are identified: pure, risky, and mixed strategies. It is shown, however, that regardless of which kind of equilibrium prevails, if candidates adopt equilibrium strategies, an election is efficient in the sense that the candidates advocate Pareto optimal policies. But one caveat to this analysis is that while an election is Pareto optimal, citizens can unanimously prefer markets to elections as a mechanism for selecting future policies.

Suggested Citation

  • Ordeshook, Peter C., 1971. "Pareto Optimality in Electoral Competition," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 65(4), pages 1141-1145, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:65:y:1971:i:04:p:1141-1145_13
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0003055400137542/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John Goodman & Philip Porter, 1985. "Majority voting and Pareto optimality," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 46(2), pages 173-186, January.
    2. Gebhard Kirchgässner, 2000. "Probabilistic Voting and Equilibrium: An Impossibility Result," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 103(1), pages 35-48, April.
    3. Melvin Hinich & Peter Ordeshook, 1971. "Social welfare and electoral competition in democratic societies," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 11(1), pages 73-87, September.
    4. Peter Coughlin, 1982. "Pareto optimality of policy proposals with probabilistic voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 39(3), pages 427-433, January.
    5. Gerald H. Kramer, 1975. "A Dynamical Model of Political Equilibrium," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 396, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:65:y:1971:i:04:p:1141-1145_13. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/psr .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.