Two’s Company, Three’s an Equilibrium: Strategic Voting and Multicandidate Elections

Author(s): John W.Patty;James M.Snyder;Michael M.Ting

Source:
    Journal:Quarterly Journal of Political Science
    ISSN Print:1554-0626,  ISSN Online:1554-0634
    Publisher:Now Publishers
    Volume 4 Number 3,

Document Type: Article
Pages: 28 (251-278)
DOI: 10.1561/100.00008056

Abstract: In this paper, we characterize equilibria in games of electoral competition between three or more office-seeking candidates. Recognizing that electoral equilibrium involves both candidates’ and voters’ strategies, we first prove existence of pure strategy electoral equilibria when candidates seek to maximize their vote share. Accordingly, the main difficulty with electoral equilibria is multiplicity. We prove that, even after restricting attention to subgame perfect Nash equilibria in weakly undominated strategies, the set of electoral equilibria is very large. We provide several characterizations of candidates’ equilibrium platforms, including a set of conditions under which equilibrium platforms are located in the minmax set. We also examine welfare implications of the results as well as connections between the noncooperative equilibria and the uncovered set.

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