Voting

• Political failures occur when the actions taken by the government do not maximise a social welfare function and may create inefficiency
• Arrow's Impossibility Theorem states that there is no SWF that aggregates unrestricted domain, non-dictatorship, the Pareto principle and independence of irrelevant alternatives
• Median Voter Theorem - if all that matters is winning, the politician moves to what the median wants
• A Condorcet winner is the option that wins the majority of pairwise comparisons
• The Hoteling-Downs model (Median Voter Theorem) shows that any outcome is unstable as the opposition can always find a closer median
• Disadvantages of the UK's FPTP: millions of people can support a party and get no representation in Parliament, tactical voting, the majority of people may prefer a party other than the one in government
• Disadvantages of the US Electoral College: safe states would get little attention from the candidates - funding is focused on the swing states
• The Italian electoral system awards 3/8 of the seats in both chambers of the parliament based on a simple majority and the rest are awarded proportionally, based on votes for each party
• Disadvantages of the Italian electoral system involve favouring larger parties, lack of preference expression and lack of voting participation