Vote trading in a legislative context: An analysis of cooperative and noncooperative strategic voting
✍ Scribed by James M. Enelow; David H. Koehler
- Publisher
- Springer US
- Year
- 1979
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 827 KB
- Volume
- 34
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0048-5829
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The concept of sophisticated voting was first developed by Farquharson in his Theory of Voting (1969). Assuming each individual decides how to vote independently of others, a sophisticated strategy tells him how to make the best use of his votes if others do likewise. If all voters adopt sophisticated strategies, no single voter can do better with another strategy.
However, a coalition of voters may benefit by adopting a joint strategy. In such an event, how should each remaining voter use his votes? It is the answer to this question which forms the basis of our approach to the subject of vote trading. By developing an analogue to sophisticated voting in a partially cooperative environment, we not only answer the question just raised but also assess the ability of individuals acting alone to limit the power of a coalition. This is a departure from the existent vote trading literature, in which it is assumed that individuals can freely defect from one vote trading coalition to join another. The approach thus far has been to evaluate the stability of vote trading coalitions with respect to rival coalitions engaged in a bidding • process for pivotal members. This literature concentrates on coalitions of majority size since only these coalitions are powerful in terms of the characteristic function form of the voting game.
Thus, the previous game-theoretic literature on vote trading has mainly been concerned with predicting which majority coalition will form. Our approach is rather to ask how individuals who do not belong to a vote trading coalition can restrict the power of that coalition, without themselves trading votes• More specifically, we concentrate on individually optimal responses to special interest, or minority.supported vote trading. Schwartz (1977) has recently constructed an example of a special interest vote trade to underscore the point that when cooperation costs are present, a minority may be