Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/67817 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
Queen's Economics Department Working Paper No. 1265
Publisher: 
Queen's University, Department of Economics, Kingston (Ontario)
Abstract: 
People vote from self-interest or from a sense of duty. Voting from self-interest requires there to be some chance, however small, that one's vote swings the outcome of the election from the political party one opposes to the political party one favours. This paper is a discussion of three models of how that chance might arise: the common sense model inferring the probability of a tied vote today from the distribution of outcomes in past elections, person-toperson randomization where each voter looks upon the political preferences of rest of the electorate as analogous to drawings from an urn with given proportions of red and blue balls, and nation-wide randomization where voters are lined up according to their valuations (positive or negative) of a win for one of the two competing parties, but where chance shifts the entire schedule of preferences up or down. Emphasis is on the third model about which this paper may have something new to say.
Subjects: 
pivotal voting
duty to vote
compulsory voting
JEL: 
D72
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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