期刊名称：CREED Working Papers / Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decision-Making
出版年度：2014
出版社：Amsterdam
摘要：We contrast the effect of plurality voting and proportional representation (PR) oncandidates’ entry behavior. We do so using the citizen‐candidate paradigm (Osborne andSlivinski, 1996 and Besley and Coate, 1997). To this aim we introduce a new way ofmodeling PR that takes coalitions explicitly into account and compare the equilibria to thoseunder plurality voting and PR without coalitions (Hamlin and Hjortlund, 2000). We find that(i) taking coalitions into accounts reduces candidate polarization; (ii) for policy‐motivatedcandidates PR leads to more polarized entrants; (iii) for office‐motivated candidates PR withcoalitions is most conducive to multi‐candidate equilibria. We complement the theoreticalanalysis with data from a laboratory experiment comparing plurality voting and PR withoutcoalitions. In line with theoretical predictions we find that higher costs of entry lead tofewer entrants that are more centrist and that PR leads to weakly more entry than plurality.
