Splitting, Squeezing and Diluting: Policy Moderation When Candidacy is Endogenous

Abstract

Some people— among them some scholars— have claimed that giving every voter mul- tiple votes to cast for the dierent candidates would lead to more moderate policies. One of their arguments relies on the squeezing eect, whereby centrist candidates are squeezed between the left and right candidates who capture all the leftist and rightist votes and, therefore, leave the centrist candidates with the sole centrist votes. I revisit this claim in a setting where candidacy is endogenous. In this context, I show that giving every voter multiple votes to cast can actually lead to more extreme, instead of more moderate, policies! I argue that this happens because of two features: (1) the inability to deter spoiling and duplicate candidacies; and (2) a greater multiplicity of voting pro…les, which helps deter candidate defections and new candidate entries. Finally, I identify a set of voting procedures which, under some restrictions, are not subject to these two features and would therefore lead to the adoption of the most moderate policies.