IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jlqjps/100.00008056.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Two's Company, Three's an Equilibrium: Strategic Voting and Multicandidate Elections

Author

Listed:
  • Patty, John W.
  • Snyder, James M.
  • Ting, Michael M.

Abstract

In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates' and voters' strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attention to subgame perfect Nash equilibria in weakly undominated strategies, the set of electoral equilibria is very large. We provide several characterizations of candidates' equilibrium platforms, including a set of conditions under which equilibrium platforms are located in the minmax set. We also examine welfare implications of the results as well as connections between the noncooperative equilibria and the uncovered set.

Suggested Citation

  • Patty, John W. & Snyder, James M. & Ting, Michael M., 2009. "Two's Company, Three's an Equilibrium: Strategic Voting and Multicandidate Elections," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 4(3), pages 251-278, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:now:jlqjps:100.00008056
    DOI: 10.1561/100.00008056
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00008056
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1561/100.00008056?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Martin Gregor, 2013. "The Optimal Ballot Structure for Double-Member Districts," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp493, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    2. Max Gallop, 2017. "More dangerous than dyads: how a third party enables rationalist explanations for war," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 29(3), pages 353-381, July.
    3. Norman Schofield, 2013. "The “probability of a fit choice”," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 17(2), pages 129-150, June.

    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:now:jlqjps:100.00008056. 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: Lucy Wiseman (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nowpublishers.com/ .

    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.