Strategic Candidacy and Voting Procedures

We study the impact of considering the incentives of candidates to strategically affect the outcome of a voting procedure. First we show that every non-dictatorial voting procedure that satisfies unanimity, is open to strategic entry or exit by candidates: there necessarily exists some candidate can affect the outcome by entering or exiting the election, even when they do not win the election. Given that strategic candidacy always matters, we analyze the impact of strategic candidacy effects. We show that the equilibrium set of outcomes of the well-known voting by successive elimination procedure expands in a well-defined way when strategic candidacy is accounted for. ∗Dutta is at the Indian Statistical Institute, 7 SJS Sansanwal Marg, New Delhi 110016, India, ([email protected]). Jackson is at the division of Humanities and Social Sciences, 228-77, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA, ([email protected]). Le Breton is at CORE, Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain La Neuve, Belgium ([email protected]). We thank Jeff Banks, Louis Gevers, and John Ledyard for helpful comments.