A Dodgson-Hare Synthesis

Abstract

In 1876, Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proposed a committee election procedure that chooses the Condorcet winner when one exists and otherwise eliminates candidates outside the Smith set, then allows for re-votes until a Condorcet winner emerges. The present paper discusses Dodgson’s work in the context of strategic election behavior and suggests a “Dodgson-Hare” method, a variation on Dodgson’s procedure, for use in public elections. This method allows for candidate withdrawal and employs Hare’s plurality-loser-elimination method to resolve persistent cycles. Given plausible assumptions about how candidates decide whether to withdraw when there is a cycle, Dodgson-Hare outperforms Hare, Condorcet-Hare, and 12 other voting rules in a series of spatial-model simulations that count how often each rule is vulnerable to coalitional manipulation. In the case of a one-dimensional spatial model, all coalitional voting strategies that are possible under Condorcet-Hare can be undone in Dodgson-Hare, by the withdrawal of candidates who have incentive to withdraw. JEL Classifications: D71, D72

Sincere, Strategic, or Something Else? The Impact of Ranked-Choice Voting on Voter Decision Making Processes

“…Several researchers have looked at voter logic under RCV compared to FPTP, finding mixed results. Some research argues that there are increased incentives to vote sincerely in RCVover FPTP (Bartholdi & Orlin, 1991;Buisseret & Prato, 2022;Drutman & Strano, 2021;Eggers & Nowacki, 2023;Green-Armytage, 2011;Simmons et al, 2022). Others instead argue that RCV may cause voters to behave more strategically (Baltz, 2022;Dummett, 1984;English House of Commons, 2010;Jesse, 2000;Kilgour et al, 2020;Laslier, 2016;Leonhardt, 2021;Reilly, 2021).…”