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When a group of people with identical preferences but different abilities in identifying the best alternative (e.g., a jury) takes a vote to decide between two alternatives, the question of strategic voting arises. That is, depending on the voting rule used to determine the collective decision, it may or may not be rational for group members to always vote for the alternative believe to be their private information indicates is better (i.e., vote informatively). In fact, we show in this paper that, if a qualified majority rule is used, then informative voting is rational only if the rule is optimal in the class of all qualified majority rules, in the sense the sense that, when everybody votes informatively, none of the other rules in this class would yield a higher expected utility. However, this necessary condition is not sufficient for informative voting to be rational. Specifically, even if the qualified majority rule used is optimal in the above sense, some of those who are least competent in correctly identifying the better alternative may increase the expected utility by sometimes voting for the alternative they believe to be inferior. A sufficient (but not necessary) condition for informative, non-strategic, voting to be rational is that the voting rule is optimal among the class of all qualified weighted majority rules, i.e., rules assigning (potentially) unequal weights to different individuals, this cannot happen: informative, non-strategic voting is rational.

Book Cover; Title; Contents; List of figures; List of tables; List of contributors; Series editor's preface; Preface; Acknowledgments; The context of economic voting: an introduction; Political institutions and economic voting; The cost of ruling: a foundation stone for two theories; The economy as context: indirect links between the economy and voters; Economics, politics, and the cost of ruling in advanced industrial democracies: how much does context matter?; Group economic voting: a comparison of the Netherlands and Germany; On a short leash: term limits and the economic voter.

What are good voting rules if voting is costly? We analyze this question for the case that an electorate chooses among two alternatives. In a symmetric private value model of voting we show that majority voting with voluntary participation Pareto-dominates majority voting with compulsory participation as well as random decision-making.

A voter only alters the outcome of an election if her/his vote is pivotal. A leading innovation of recent years in game theory applied to politics is Austen-Smith and Banks' analysis of pivotal voting, yielding a special form of strategic voting such that rational voters would vote against the side they favor if the decision were to be made by their vote alone. This note gives a non-mathematical version of the ASB argument, and explains why the result requires conditions which, in fact, are unlikely ever to be observed under actual conditions of social choice.

The average voter falls far short of the prescriptions of classic democratic theory in terms of interest, knowledge, and participation in politics. We suggest a more realistic standard: Citizens fulfill their democratic duties if, most of the time, they vote "correctly." Relying on an operationalization of correct voting based on fully informed interests, we present experimental data showing that, most of the time, people do indeed manage to vote correctly. We also show that voters' determinations of their correct vote choices can be predicted reasonably well with widely available survey data. We illustrate how this measure can be used to determine the proportion of the electorate voting correctly, which we calculate at about 75% for the five American presidential elections between 1972 and 1988. With a standard for correct vote decisions, political science can turn to exploring the factors that make it more likely that people will vote correctly.

This collection examines to what extents the economic situation is a decisive factor in dictating how people vote. The book combines theoretical work with empirical research and quantitative analysis.

AbstractWhile majority‐minority districts are bitterly litigated in the courts, a "quiet revolution" is taking place in jurisdictions across the nation employing the alternative system of cumulative voting.