We examine through an experimental design how rational and non-rational considerations affect the decision to vote or to abstain in First Past the Post and PR elections. We show that in both types of elections, but particularly so under PR, a majority of subjects do not make the "right"...

In this paper, we clarify the relationship between influence/power measurement and utility measurement, the most popular two social objective criteria used when evaluating voting mechanisms. For one particular probabilistic model describing the preferences of the electorate, the so-called...

The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the probability of casting a decisive vote for a class or random electorate models encompassing the celebrated IC and IAC models. The emphasis is on the impact of correlation across votes on the order of magnitude of this event. Our proof techniques...

Pre-election “intention to vote” has come to substitute for “reported vote” or “validated vote” in many studies of turnout. The differences among them have been little studied. In this report, we examine all three jointly in a single U.S. dataset for what we believe is the first...

This paper considers electoral competition between two office-motivated parties and one voter, in the presence of two alternative policies and under imperfect information. The theory of refinements of Nash equilibrium predicts the outcome of this three-player game: both parties faithfully use...