Voting as Communicating (Q4949580)

The author is interested in constructing a voting model to accommodate voters who are balancing two motives in casting their vote. On the one hand, they want to influence the outcome of the current election. On the other hand, they want to use their votes to communicate information that may affect future elections. For example, voters may register a `protest' vote to express dissatisfaction with some of the policies of their party of preference in order to affect future policy decisions of that party. Alternatively, they may wish to use their votes as a signal to influence other voters' decisions. Thus, the voters in this model are a mixture of `sincere' and `strategic'. In this paper, the author focuses on the use of votes as a mechanism for communication between voters. In order to allow for feedback, that is, to let one voter's signal affect the decision of a second voter, the author proposes and studies a two-round electoral system. In the second round, voters use the information gained from first-round voting in casting their votes. Thus, this system is different from, say, STV, where voters can balance sincere and strategic motives, but do not gain information about other voters' sincere preferences. The author considers both two candidate and multi-party elections and describes precise conditions under which different types of equilibria exist. He also studies efficiency properties for the model under various hypotheses. His final conclusions are that in elections with three or more candidates, multiple-round systems are strictly more efficient than a one-round plurality system (Proposition 7), although this is not necessarily true in the case of two-candidate elections (Propositions 3 and 4).