A Unified Theory of Voting

This book addresses the questions: how do voters use their own issue positions and those of candidates to decide how to vote? Does a voter tend to choose the candidate who most closely shares the views of the voter or rather a candidate who holds more extreme views due to the fact that the voters discount the candidates' abilities to implement policy. The authors develop a unified model that incorporates these and other voter motivations and assess its empirical predictions - for both voter choice and candidate strategy - in the US, Norway, and France. The analyses show that a combination of proximity, direction, discounting, and party ID are compatible with the mildly but not extremely divergent policies that are characteristic of many two-party and multiparty electorates. All of these motivations are necessary to understand the linkage between candidate issue positions and voter preferences.

Samuel Merrill III is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University. His research interests include mathematical modeling in voting behavior, party strategy, and social choice, as well as medical statistics. Bernard Grofman is Professor of Political Science and Social Psychology at the University of California, Irvine. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. His major fields of interest are American politics, comparative election systems, and social choice theory.