Abstract

Voters have preferences over parties and candidates. Their ability to express these preferences in an election is constrained by the ballot choices that are presented to them and in the way in which ballots are aggregated into outcomes. In most cases voters do not sense the impact of these constraints, nor any tension between their preferences and their choices. In single member district systems with plurality rule (SMD), they simply vote for the candidate that they most prefer. In multi-candidate proportional representation (PR) elections, sincere voters’ rankings of candidates mirror their preference orderings. Sometimes, however, voters do not act sincerely, and make choices that do not follow from a straightforward mapping of their preferences.