Strategic Voting in Plurality Elections

What is it about?

This paper extends McKelvey and Ordeshook’s (1972) Calculus of Voting, providing the first direct derivation of the conditions under which voters will vote strategically: choose their second-most preferred candidate in order to prevent their least-preferred candidate from winning.

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Why is it important?

Addressing this theoretical problem is important, as nearly all empirical research on strategic voting either implicitly or explicitly tests hypotheses which originate from this seminal model. The formal result allows us to isolate the subset of voters to which strategic voting hypotheses properly apply, and in turn motivates a critical reevaluation of past empirical work.