8 - Strategic voting, nonseparability, and probabilistic voting
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Discretion is the better part of virtue, Commitments the voters don't know about can't hurt you.
(Ogden Nash, The Old Dog Barks Backward, 1972, “Political Reflections”)In earlier chapters, we have presented a model of how people vote in a “committee” setting. As the reader will recall, the assumptions of committee voting are: (a) Each participant has full information about all possible alternatives and has well-defined preferences over those alternatives; (b) those preferences are separable across issues, so that even if the policy space is multidimensional, we can act as if issues are voted on one at a time; (c) each participant knows the preferences of all other participants; (d) all participants have free, equal power to propose alternatives; and (e) votes are assumed to be sincere, in the sense that if a member prefers alternative A to alternative B, he or she votes for A over B in a pairwise majority rule comparison.
We have also noted that this model is only a starting point. Real committee voting decisions are far more complicated. One complication is that the location of members' “ideal points” is the result of a variety of outside pressures and use of information, so that the ideal point is induced rather than being a primitive “preference.” Still, since we have taken member ideal points as exogenous, accounting for the origin or process of formation of the preference is not too difficult.
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- Analytical Politics , pp. 157 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997