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Stability and Centrality of Legislative Choice in the Spatial Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1987

Bernard Grofman ,
Guillermo Owen ,
Nicholas Noviello  and
Amihai Glazer
Bernard Grofman
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Guillermo Owen
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Nicholas Noviello
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Amihai Glazer
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Abstract

Majority-rule spatial voting games lacking a core still always present a “near-core” outcome, more commonly known as the Copeland winner. This is the alternative that defeats or ties the greatest number of alternatives in the space. Previous research has not tested the Copeland winner as a solution concept for spatial voting games without a core, lacking a way to calculate where the Copeland winner was with an infinite number of alternatives. We provide a straightforward algorithm to find the Copeland winner and show that it corresponds well to experimental outcomes in an important set of experimental legislative voting games. We also provide an intuitive motivation for why legislative outcomes in the spatial context may be expected to lie close to the Copeland winner. Finally, we show a connection between the Copeland winner and the Shapley value and provide a simple but powerful algorithm to calculate the Copeland scores of all points in the space in terms of the (modified) power values of each of the voters and their locations in the space.

Type
Articles
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 539 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1987

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