The impact of voters’ preference diversity on the probability of some electoral outcomes

Abstract

Voting rules are known to exhibit various paradoxical or problematic behaviors, typically in the form of their failure to meet the Condorcet criterion or in their vulnerability to strategic voting. Our basic premise is that a decrease in the number of coalitions of voters that exist with similar preference rankings should generally lead to a reduced propensity of voting rules to yield undesired results. Surprisingly enough, conclusions that are reported by Felsenthal et al. (1990) in an early study do not corroborate this intuition. This study reconsiders and extends the Felsenthal et al. analysis by using a modified Impartial Anonymous Culture (IAC) model. It turns out that the results obtained with this probabilistic assumption are much more consistent with the stated intuitive premise.