Politics Transformed? Electoral Competition under Ranked Choice Voting
We compare multi-candidate elections under plurality rule versus ranked choice voting (RCV). Candidates choose whether to conduct a broad campaign that can appeal to all voters, or instead pursue a targeted campaign that favors a narrow segment of voters. We examine a widely held presumption that RCV more effectively incentivizes candidates to campaign broadly, compared to plurality rule. We identify conditions under which this presumption is true. However, we also unearth real-world relevant contexts in which the prediction reverses: when voters are divided by partisan, ethnic, geographic or cultural cleavages the possibility of winning second preferences under can intensify candidates’ incentives to pursue targeted campaigns, relative to plurality.
Peter Buisseret is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University. He works in the fields of political economy and formal theory. His research uses the tools of game theory to study political institutions, how they structure political and economic incentives, and how they can be improved.
His work appears in the American Political Science Review, the American Economic Review, and the American Journal of Political Science. He previously held faculty positions at the University of Chicago and the University of Warwick. He received his PhD from Princeton University.