Classical Electoral Competition Under Approval Voting

In large societies, collective decisions cannot be taken directly but have to be delegated to professional decision makers. In a democracy, these delegates are typically elected through a competitive mechanism. The simplest expression of such a mechanism is the now standard

Downsian

model of Politics (Downs 1951) in which a relatively small number of candidates face a relatively large number of voters, the candidates are purely office-motivated and the voters policy-motivated. For the purpose of winning the election, each candidate freely and independently proposes a policy from a fixed and common set of possible policies. Voters are only interested in policies and not in candidates

per se

. They trust that the elected candidate will implement the policy she is proposing.