Voting as Communicating |
| |
Authors: | Thomas Piketty |
| |
Institution: | CNRS (CEPREMAP, URA 928) |
| |
Abstract: | This paper develops a model where voters trade-off two different motiveswhen deciding how to vote: they care about current decision-making (theyare "strategic"), but they also care about communicating theirviews about their most-preferred candidate so as to influence futureelections, by influencing other voters' opinion and/or partypositioning. In effect, voters in this model are intermediate between"strategic" and "sincere" voters of conventionalmodels in elections with more than 2 candidates. This allows us to betterinvestigate the relative efficiency of various electoral systems: our mainconclusion is that since voting is used as a communication device electoralsystems should be designed to facilitate efficient communication, e.g. by opting for 2-round systems rather than 1-round systems. |
| |
Keywords: | |
|
|