The standard view of the rational voter is one who votes for the party or candidate whose positions are closest to the voter's on those ideological or issue dimensions of importance to the voter. In recent years, a highly sophisticated body of research has explored the ideological structure or "issue space" of voters, candidates, and political parties and the linkages among them. An important outcome of this research is a body of theory suggesting that the success of elections in selecting candidates who are closest to the voters' ideal is heavily influenced by the type of electoral system used. To date, however, most research on spatial theory has concentrated on American style, plurality elections involving only two candidates. This award supports doctoral dissertation research designed to test the validity of spatial theories of voting in multicandidate elections such as many primary and local non-partisan elections in the United States, and the national elections in other countries. When only two candidates compete for office the traditional American system of single member districts and plurality voting has been shown to be sufficient to insure a good fit between election outcomes and voter issue beliefs. However, in multicandidate elections theory suggests that single member districts with plurality voting are likely to produce unstable equilibrium. Prevailing theory also suggests that adoption of majority rules with single member districts or the use of multimember districts with plurality rules will solve this problem. To test these theoretical predictions this project examines voting patterns in Chile, one of the few political systems which uses both two candidate and multicandidate elections concurrently and thus provides an controlled environment in which to isolate the effects of the different electoral systems. An unusually rich data set on Chilean elections already has been assembled and made available to the Principal Investigator to facilitate this research. When completed this research will enhance our understanding of voter decisions, the relationships between voters and candidates, and the effect on those decision and relationships of alternative electoral systems. In so doing this research will provide important information that will facilitate evaluations of the effectiveness of electoral systems in the United States and elsewhere.
