This study considers a hybrid voting model where some of the voters sincerely vote but the others may not. By using the model, we discuss several voting rules: the random dictatorship rule, plurality rule, Borda rule and others. In each rule, we derive the threshold such that a Pareto efficient...

When voters fear that politicians may have a right-wing bias or that they may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of true left-wing conviction are valuable. As a consequence, even a moderate politician seeking reelection chooses ‘populist’ policies – i.e., policies to the...

We introduce the prediction value (PV) as a measure of players' informational importance in probabilistic TU games. The latter combine a standard TU game and a probability distribution over the set of coalitions. Player i's prediction value equals the difference between the conditional...

An economic argument in favor of direct democracy in a social choice setting with pure common values, private noisy information about an unobservable payoff-relevant state of the world, and costless voting is essentially one about information aggregation: if all citizens vote according to their...

In U.S. presidential elections, voters in noncompetitive states seem not to count — and so have zero voting power, according to the Banzhaf and other voting-power indices — because they cannot influence the outcome in their states. But because the electoral votes of these states are...

Why should political parties say what they do not want instead of saying what they want? In this paper, we introduce the concept of negative positioning into spatial models of voting and discuss its relevance as a campaigning tool in European multiparty systems. By negative positioning, we refer...

In most OECD countries direct public funding to political parties is provided and its allocation is executed on the basis of two principles, i.e., (i) proportional to the votes (or alternatively the number of seats), and (ii) equal distribution. We consider the existence of an optimal policy and...

In this article I analyze a model of interest group influence on legislative voting through information transmission. The model shows how interest groups may manipulate voting coalitions to their advantage by crafting different messages to target different winning coalitions. Furthermore, if...

In a functioning democracy, the legitimacy of government rests on citizens' confidence in the political system and its decisions. The ability to express preferences and consider these preferences in decision-making is a critical aspect of democracy. This study investigates the impact of voting...