Electoral outcomes with probabilistic voting and Nash social welfare maxima

Political Preferences and the Aging of Populations

“…In contrast, assuming probabilistic voting behavior, i.e., introducing enough voter heterogeneity and thus uncertainty about voters' choices, significantly increases the likelihood of a Nash equilibrium with two (see Coughlin and Nitzan (1981); Enelow and Hinich (1989);Coughlin (1992)) or more parties (see Lin et al (1999)) in a multidimensional context. Probabilistic models ensure existence of equilibria because they yield payoff functions that are smooth in policy choices.…”

Intellectual foundations of public choice, the forest from the trees

“…Oddly enough, if voters are only roughly able to assess their interests-rather than fully able to do so-electoral competition in multiple dimensions tends to be more stable, and both majority and minority interests tend to be taken into account by the winning candidates and parties-who again usually converge to moderate platforms. What came to be called stochastic voter models are more likely to have stable and attractive electoral equilibria than deterministic models (Coughlin and Nitzan 1981). 4 These new ideas, in turn, induced additional efforts to generalize earlier results, probe for new weaknesses, and undertake statistical and experimental tests of their implications.…”

Static and Dynamic Aspects of General Disequilibrium Theory

“…Voting models with some probabilistic aspects were first rigorously analyzed in Ordeshook (1969, 1971), and Hinich, Ledyard and Ordeshook (1972). For the sake of simplicity, in this chapter probabilistic voting models without abstentions will be considered following the approach of among others, Comanor (1976), Coughlin and Nitzan (1981b), and Feldman and Lee (1988). In Wittman (1984) the following two arguments for the probabilistic voting model are given.…”