When are plurality rule voting games dominance-solvable?

This paper studies the dominance-solvability (by iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies) of plurality rule voting games. For any number of alternatives and at least four voters, we find sufficient conditions for the game to be dominance-solvable (DS) and not to be DS. These conditions can be stated in terms of only one aspect of the game, the largest proportion of voters who agree on which alternative is worst in a sequence of subsets of the original set of alternatives. When the number of voters is large, “almost all” games can be classified as either DS or not DS. When the electorate is sufficiently replicated, then if the game is DS, a Condorcet winner always exists, and the outcome is the Condorcet winner.  2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C72; D72; D71