Dutta, Jackson and Le Breton (Econometrica, 2001) initiates the study of strategic candidacy. A voting procedure satisfies candidate stability if no candidate has incentives to withdraw her candidacy in order to manipulate the voting outcome in her favor. Dutta et al. (2001) shows that a single...

Duvergers law predicts a long-run two-candidate stable outcome under a plurality voting system. The waste vote argument explains the law by emphasizing strategic voters' tendency to abandon candidates commonly perceived to have the least support. However, the argument does not apply to cases...