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Multilingual elections may democratically enfranchise linguistic minorities, or may promote extremist, uncompromising, clientelistic, inefficient politics. One theoretical approach to this question extends existing spatial models of elections, allowing candidates to state different positions in different languages and assuming that language barriers give voters incomplete information about the positions stated in their non-native languages. In a simple model of multilingual campaigning, candidates under some conditions can state different positions in different languages so that every voter aggregates the positions into a perception coinciding exactly with the voter's own position. To do this, candidates must choose positions more extreme than the positions of the respective audiences. As groups gain multilingual fluency, candidate extremism further increases. Extremism is vote-maximizing unless voters sufficiently penalize inconsistency. When inconsistency is important enough, candidates consistently take the position of the larger group in 2-group elections, and of the ideologically central group in 3-group elections.

Multilingual elections can either (1) democratically enfranchise lingustic minorities, or (2) promote extremist, umcompromising, clientelistic, inefficient politics. One theoretical approach extends existing spatial models of elections, allowing candidates to state different positions in different languages & assuming that language barriers give voters incomplete information about the positions stated in their nonnative languages. In a simple model of multilingual campaigning, candidates under some conditions can state different positions in different languages so that every voter aggregates the positions into a perception coinciding exactly with the voter's own position. To do this, candidates must choose positions more extreme than the positions of the respective audiences. As groups gain multilingual fluency, candidate extremism increases. Extremism is vote-maximizing unless voters sufficiently penalize inconsistency, in which case, candidates consistently take the postion of the larger group in two-group elections, & of the ideologically central group in three-group elections. 1 Figure, 1 Appendix, 13 References. Adapted from the source document.

Polities and organizations use and require particular languages for official business. The choice of official languages is a vexing issue. Theorists, convinced that a fair language policy cannot be efficient, have despaired of an elegant solution. To investigate this apparent dilemma, I mathematically model the problem of choosing an efficient and fair language policy for a plurilingual polity. The policy designates official languages and taxes the language groups to pay for translation among the official languages. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, this model implies that a fair language policy can be efficient. But what if language groups rationally misrepresent the costs of using a nonnative official language? Even then, the policy maker can discover a fair language policy and, under some conditions, can use a cost-revelation procedure that discovers a fair and efficient language policy. The results challenge the claim that efficiency and practicality excuse the inferior treatment of language minorities.

Language planning often aims to fix the statuses, roles, and functions of languages, and hence the choices among languages that speakers and writers make. This has been called "language status planning." A second object of language policy, however, is the content and structure of languages themselves: vocabularies, sound systems, word structures, sentence structures, writing systems, and stylistic repertoires. Intervention of this kind is "language corpus planning." The Soviet distinction between the "functional development" of a language and its "internal development" or "enrichment" is parallel. Soviet language policies deal both with status problems (for example, how long and how widely should language X be used?) and with corpus problems (for example, how should language X be developed and regulated?). The Soviet Turkic languages exhibit these issues with particular complexity because of their number, their close interrelations, their similarity to a non-socialist country's language (Turkish), their dissimilarity to Russian, their pre-Soviet Arabic (if any) alphabets, and their traditions of borrowing from Arabic and Persian, associated culturally with Islam and perceived backwardness.