Insincere voting under the successive procedure

Most European parliaments use the successive procedure to reach decisions. This means that a parliament votes feasible alternatives one-by-one in a pre-determined order until one of them obtains a majority of votes.

By Bjørn Erik Rasch

Abstract


The paper has two objectives. First, I sketch a simple method making it easy to uncover instances of successful insincere voting under the successive procedure. Second, by focusing on data from one national assembly consistently using this procedure, I demonstrate that insincere or strategic voting is very rare. The finding does not indicate that politicians necessarily behave in a non-strategic or unsophisticated manner. It means only that strategic maneuvers may take place at earlier stages of the decision-making process, for example, in designing the voting agenda.

This paper is published in Public Choice vol. 158 (March 2014), issue 3-4, pp. 499-511  (online from January 2013).

Published Apr. 30, 2013 12:44 PM - Last modified Sep. 17, 2014 9:36 AM