Splitting, Squeezing and Diluting: Policy Moderation when Candidacy is Endogenous and Voting is Sincere

This paper investigates the claim that giving voters multiple votes to cast would result in more moderate policies as compared to when voters have only one vote to cast. This claim is based on the argument that when voters have only one vote to cast, centrist candidates are squeezed between the left and right candidates who capture all the leftist and rightist votes. It has then been argued that giving every voter multiple votes to cast would ‘unsqueeze’ the centrist candidates, which would improve the electoral prospects of the centrist candidates and result in more moderate policies as compared to when voters have only one vote to cast. The present paper shows that this need not be true when candidacy is endogenous: Giving voters multiple votes to cast can then actually result in more extreme policies as compared to when voters have only one vote to cast! This happens because of two features that characterize many of the electoral rules that give voters multiple votes to cast: (1) the inability to deter spoiling and multiple similar candidacies; and (2) the multiplicity of admissible voting pro…les, which helps support selfful…lling prophecies that deter entries in and defections from the race. Coombs Voting, an instant-runo¤ electoral rule, is shown to exhibit neither of these two features and to always result in the adoption of the most moderate policies. Approval Voting is also shown to always implement moderate policies but only after some restrictions are imposed on the voting and candidacy behaviors. Whether these restrictions would actually be satis…ed if elections were held under Approval Voting is an empirical question.