MCDM and Models of Voting Decision Making

A rational voter’s behaviour can be analysed within the framework of a standard consumer behaviour pattern: voting for candidate(s), the voter is “buying” a policy represented by candidates and maximizing his “utility” subject to a “budget constraint” given by a used voting procedure. In this paper we formulate a model of an individual voter behaviour in the election of a committee, based on so called voting constraint and a utility function, defined over a set of feasible voting strategies. A class of utility functions is suggested on the basis of a multi-criteria optimization problem, in which the voter minimizes a distance between his ranking of the major political issues and the aggregate ranking of these issues by the candidates, generated by the voter’s voting portfolio selected from the set of feasible voting strategies. Using goal programming techniques optimal voting portfolio can be calculated. A game theoretical analysis of the problems associated with voting decision making is suggested.