Browsing by Author "Ordeshook, Peter C."

Now showing 1 - 27 of 27

Agendas, Strategic Voting, and Signaling with Incomplete Information
(1986) Ordeshook, Peter C.; Palfrey, Thomas
"The literature on agendas with sincere and strategic voting represents an important contribution to our understanding of committees, of institutions, and of the opportunities to manipulate outcomes by the manipulation of institutions. That literature, though, imposes an assumption that may be unrealistic in many situations; namely, that everyone knows the preferences of everyone else. In this essay we apply Bayesian equilibrium analysis to show that the properties of agendas that others derive assuming complete information do not hold necessarily under incomplete information. First, a Condorcet winner need not be selected , even if nearly everyone on the committee most prefers it. Second, the '2 step theorem,' that any outcome reachable in voting stages via some amendment agenda is reachable in two stages under sophisticated voting, need not hold. Third, nonbinding votes such as straw polls, can critically effect final outcomes."
Alliances in Anarchic International Systems
(1991) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Alliances play a central role in international relations theory. However, aside from applications of traditional cooperative game theory that ignore the issue of enforcement in anarchic systems, or interpretations of the repeated Prisoners' Dilemma in the attempt to understand the source of cooperation in such systems, we have little theory on which to base predictions about alliance formation. This essay, then, builds on an n-country, non-cooperative, game-theoretic model of conflict in anarchic systems in order to furnish a theoretical basis for such predictions. Defining an alliance as a collection of countries that jointly abide by 'collective security strategies' with respect to each other but not with respect to members outside of the alliance, we establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for an alliance system to be stable. In addition, we show that not all winning or minima l winning coalitions can form alliances, that alliances among smaller states can be stable, that bipolar alliance structures do not exhaust the set of stable structures, and that only specific countries can play the role of balancer."
Alliances Versus Federations: An Analysis with Military and Economic Capabilities Distinguished
(1994) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"This essay explores the distinction between federations and alliances and asks the question: When will states choose to federate rather than ally? William Riker (1964) argues that a necessary condition for a federal state's formation is that those offering the federal bargain must seek to 'expand their territorial control, usually either to meet an external military or diplomatic threat or to prepare for military or diplomatic aggression and aggrandizement.' This argument, though, fails to ask why states sometimes respond to threats by forming federations and at other times by forming alliances. Here, after assuming that states have initial endowments of military and economic resources, where economic resources enter utility functions directly and are what states maximize and where military capability influences preference only insofar as it determines a state's ability to counter threats, we offer a multi-stage game-theoretic model in which states may be compelled to divert economic resources to military spending. Alliances, in turn, are self-enforcing coalitions designed to augment a state's offensive or defensive capabilities. Federations, which serve the same ends as alliances, are coalitions that need to be enforced by the "higher authority" established when the federation is formed. Our operationg assumption is that states seek to form a federation in lieu of an alliance if and only if (1) a stable alliance partition does not exist or, if one exists, it is dominated by an unstable partition and (2) if the cost of the loss of sovereignty to each state in the ferderation is offset by the gains from joining it, relative to what that state secures as its security value."
Conflict and Stability in Anarchic International Systems
(1989) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"A considerable part of theory in international relations concerns the issue of whether cooperation and stability can emerge from the competition and self-interest of sovereign powers existing in a state of anarchy. Does anarchy, if ever, imply stability in the form of a balance-of-power, or does stability require restraints which arise from the complex nexus of interdependencies characterizing the contemporary world economy and its associated institutions? The analysis in this essay supposes that nation-states are each endowed with some infinitely divisible resource, which those states maximize and which also measures their ability to overcome adversaries in the event of conflict. In this context we reexamine and reformulate the realist view, by offering a noncooperative, extensive-form model of international conflict without exogenous mechanisms for the enforcement of agreements in order to uncover the conditions under which a balance-of-power as construed by our model ensures the sovereignty of all states in anarchic systems. Our primary conclusion is simple: there exists at least one world, albeit abstract and reminiscent of the frictionless planes with which we introduce the perspectives of physics, in which a balance-of-power ensures sovereignty."
Constitutional Secession Clauses
(1993) Chen, Yan; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Taking the view that constitutions are devices whereby people coordinate to specific equilibria in circumstances that allow multiple equilibria, we show that a constitutional secession clause can serve as such a device and, therefore, that such a clause is more than an empty promise or an ineffectual threat. Employing a simple three-person recursive game, we establish that under certain conditions, this game possesses two equilibria - one in which a disadvantaged federal unit secedes and is not punished by the other units in the federation, and a second equilibrium in which this unit does not secede but is punished if it chooses to do so."
Constitutions for New Democracies: Reflections of Turmoil or Agents of Stability?
(1995) Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Despite the widely held view in newly emerging democracies that constitutions are mere words on paper or that parchment barriers cannot render a state stable or democratic, those who draft such documents commonly act as if words ARE of consequence. The difficulty, however, is that contemporaneous conflicts too easily intervene so as to corrupt the drafting process and to preclude optimal constitutional design. The specific principle of design most likely to be violated is the proposition that we treat all parts of the constitution as an interconnected whole and that we not try to assess the consequences of one part without appreciating the full meaning of all other parts. This essay illustrates this violation by looking at the new Russian Constitution, ratified by direct popular vote in December 1993, with special attention paid to that document's treatment of federalism. We offer the additional argument, however, that even contemporary research in political institutional design pays insufficient heed to this principle."
A Decade of Experimental Research on Spatial Models of Elections and Committees
(1987) McKelvey, Richard D.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"The Euclidean representation of political issues and alternative outcomes, and the associated representation of preferences as quasi-concave utility functions is by now a staple of formal models of committees and elections. This theoretical development, moreover, is accompanied by a considerable body of experimental research. We can view that research in two ways: as a test of the basic propositions about equilibria in specific institutional settings, and as an attempt to gain insights into those aspects of political processes that are poorly understood or imperfectly modeled, such as the robustness of theoretical results with respect to procedural details and bargaining environments. This essay reviews that research so that we can gain some sense of its overall import."
Elections with Limited Information: A Multi-Dimensional Model
(1984) McKelvey, Richard D.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"We develop a game theoretic model of 2 candidate competition over a multidimensional policy space, where the participants have incomplete information about the preferences and strategy choices of other participants . The players consist of the voters and the candidates. Voters are partitioned into two classes, depending on the information they observe. Informed voters observe candidate strategy choices while uninformed voters do not. All players (voters and candidates alike ) observe contemporaneous poll data broken down by various subgroups of the population. The main results of the paper give condition s on the number and distribution of the informed and uninformed voters which are sufficient to guarantee that any equilibrium (or voter equilibrium ) extracts all information ."
Elections with Limited Information; A Fulfilled Expectations Model Using Contemporaneous Poll and Endorsement Data as Information Sources
(1982) McKelvey, Richard D.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"This paper is one of several papers in which we develop and test models of 2 candidate elections under extremely decentralized and incomplete information conditions. We assume candidates do not know voter utility functions, and that most voters do not observe the policy positions adopted by the candidates. We assume that uninformed actors (voters and candidates alike ) have 'beliefs' about parameters of which they are uninformed, and that they attempt to inform these belief s on the basis of readily observable variable s endogenous to the system. Specifically, in this paper, we assume that uninformed actors inform their beliefs, and hence condition their behavior, on the basis of contemporaneous poll and (binary) endorsement data. An equilibrium is defined to be a set of strategies , together wit h a set of beliefs, such that all actors are maximizing expected utility subject to their beliefs, and such that no actor wants to revise his beliefs conditional on the information he does observe. This paper develops the above model only for the case of a one dimensional policy space with symmetric single peaked preferences. When the electorate is modeled as being infinite, with the cumulative density of ideal points for both informed and uninformed voters being invertible, we show that regardless of the number of informed voters in an equilibrium , the candidates behave exactly as if all voters had information. They respond to the preferences of the uninformed as well as the informed voters, ending up at the median ideal point of the entire electorate. Further, we show that regardless of candidate behavior, if voters are in equilibrium , their votes will extract all available information, in the sense that all voters, informed and uninformed alike, will vote as if they had perfect information about candidate positions. Finally, we give a dynamic for convergence of voting behavior, which shows that the model implies a 'bandwagon' effect, with the speed of convergence depending on the ratio of the density of informed to uninformed voters at the true candidate midpoint. In addition to the theoretical results, we run some experiments to test the implications of the model. The experiments show a moderate degree of support for the model."
Ethnic Heterogeneity, District Magnitude, and the Number of Parties
(1992) Ordeshook, Peter C.; Shvetsova, Olga
"Recent events leading to the importation of democratic ideas and ideals by previously totalitarian states increase our interest in the ways in which electoral institutions influence party systems. However, even if we restrict our attention to Eastern Europe or the successor states of the Soviet empire, we encounter a range of social diversity - ethnic heterogeneity - that is as great as those in the set of countries examined in earlier studies that seek to identify the influence of electoral laws (c.f., Rae, Lijphart, and Taagepera and Shugart). Curiously, though, these earlier studies fail to ascertain whether and to what extent electoral laws mediate the influence of this heterogeneity. Hence, to develop a more pragmatic understanding of electoral institutions, we adopt the view of electoral laws as intervening structures and, using the data of these earlier analyses, we reconsider the role of one institutional parameter - district magnitude - that some researchers regard as the most important characteristic of an electoral system. Aside from the usual caveats about - the limitations of our data, our primary conclusion is that district magnitude is not merely an important determinant of the number of parties that compete in a political system, but that it can offset the tendency of parties to multiply in heterogeneous societies."
Fraud or Fiction: Who Stole What in Russia's December 1993 Elections
(1996) Filippov, Mikhail; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Serious allegations of fraud have been made with respect to Russia's first competitive party-based parliamentary election in December 1993 - the same election in which Russian's ostensibly ratified a new constitution for themselves. Although charges of fraud are common in elections, these allegations are especially serious in that the argument here was that over 9 million ballots were fraudulently cast and that the turnout threshold of 50% required to render the constitutional referendum legitimate was in fact not surpassed. These are profoundly important allegations. First, they bring into question the legitimacy of Russia's new constitution and thereby offer its opponents an excuse to suspend its provisions some time in the future. Second, they naturally enough cause us to be suspicious of Russia's December 1995 parliamentary elections. Finally, to the extent that the same methods for detecting fraud are likely to be applied to subsequent elections, if they revel significant levels of fraud there, they can provide an excuse for canceling those elections or invalidating their results. In this essay, then, we look at the two methodologies employed to detect and measure the extent of fraud in 1993. Without disputing the possibility that fraud was in fact extensive, we conclude that neither methodology as presently developed is adequate to the task at hand. The first, which assumes that we should observe a linear relationship between the log of the rank of parties and the log of their support at the polls employs a number of ad hoc assumptions and a priori estimates that, in sum, are equivalent to assuming the conclusion. The second method, which looks at the relationship between turnout and the share of the electorate voting for one party or position versus another, is subject to a number of methodological pitfalls, including aggregation error and the possibility that unobserved variables correlate with both turnout and support so as to render any relationship indeterminate. Nevertheless, of the two methodologies, the second is the most promising for further development and our critique of it is intended to point the way to the requisite developments."
A Game-Theoretic Interpretation of Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War'
(1990) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Over twenty five hundred years ago the Chinese scholar Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, attempted to codify the general strategic character of conflict and, in the process, offer practical advice about how to win military conflicts. His advice is credited with having greatly influenced both Japanese military and business practices, as well as Mao Tse-Tung's approach to conflict and revolution. The question, however, is whether or to what extent Sun Tzu anticipated the implications of the contemporary theory of conflict — game theory. The thesis of this essay is that he can be credited with having anticipated the concepts of dominant, minmax, and mixed strategies, but that he failed to intuit the full implications of the notion of equilibrium strategies. Thus, while he offers a partial resolution of 'he-thinks-that-I-think' regresses, his advice remains vulnerable to a more complete strategic analysis."
The Geographical Imperatives of the Balance of Power in 3-Country Systems
(1987) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"This essay extends a cooperative game-theoretic model of balance of power in anarchic international systems to include considerations of the asymmetry which geography occasions in the offensive and defensive capabilities of countries. The two substantive ideas which concern us are a formalization of the notion of a 'balancer' and that of a 'central power.' What we show is that in stable systems, only specific countries (such as Britain in the 18th and the 19th centuries) can play the role of balances, and that the strategic imperatives of a central country (e.g., Germany in the period 1871-1945) differ in important ways from those of 'peripheral' countries."
If Hamilton and Madison Were Merely Lucky, What Hope is there for Russian Federalism?
(1995) Ordeshook, Peter C.; Shvetsova, Olga
"Just as the two-headed eagle of imperial and contemporary Russia looks in two different directions, this essay has two objectives: to evaluate, on the basis of the American experience, the prospects for stable democratic federalism in Russia, and to reconsider the insights into federalism offered by Madison and Hamilton in The Federalist. The swirl of events in Russia make it difficult if not impossible to confidently render conclusions about the future direction of events and the prospects for meaningful federal domestic relations. However, some theoretical perspective can be gained by looking at the theory of federalism offered in The Federalist Papers, with special attention to Madison and Hamilton's failure to appreciate fully the role political parties would play in the eventual integration of American political institutions so as to establish, in Madison's words, a 'properly structured' federation. Looking as well at the early history of parties in the U.S. we see, in addition to the usual constitutional provisions associated with federalism, the importance of those things that structure political competition within states. Properly designed, these things encourage the development of political parties that mirror federal relations, and integrate regional and national political elites so as to avert center-periphery conflict. Unfortunately, a review of the provisions currently in place for Russia reveals that electoral practices and regional and republic constitutions and proposals are unlikely to encourage parties of the sort that facilitate a stable federal system. This fact, in conjunction with several other trends (notably, corruption and the political instincts of political elites in Moscow) lead to the conclusion that a 'federation' of the type currently observed in, say, Mexico is a better scenario of the future for Russia than is a federation that imitates the U.S., Australia, Germany, or Switzerland."
Institutions and Incentives: The Prospects for Russian Democracy
(1994) Ordeshook, Peter C.
"The lament that Russia is at the mercy of powerful personalities contesting for the reigns of power may be accurate. But here we want to find a way out of this condition. We begin by noting that more than mere lip-service needs to be paid to the idea that the two dimensions of reform -economic and political- are fused and that one cannot be attacked without attacking the other. Just as economic policies are manipulated in accordance with the principle that socially desirable outcomes cannot be willed or wished into existence - they derive, if at all, from the ways in which government action and the structure of economic institutions channel individual self-interest - the same must be true of political reform. Tracing the interests established by Russia's current constitutional order with respect to representative and elections, though, we conclude that the order and those interests almost certainly preordain executive-legislative conflict. Focusing, then, on those things that can be changed without constitutional amendment, we suggest a set of electoral reforms that promise to aleviate at least this problem and that allow for presidential leadership rather than the mere administration of authority and power."
'Less Filling, Tastes Great': The Realist-Neoliberal Debate
(1992) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"This essay examines and reformulates the realist-neoliberal debate. Focusing initially on the issue of the attribution of goals to states, we argue that not only are goals merely the apiphenomena of other things but also that theory specification constitutes but a redescription of strategic environments."
Notes on Constitutional Change in the ROC: Presidential versus Parliamentary Government
(1993) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"The debate over constitutional reform has moved to center stage in Taiwan, with a focus on two issues: the choice of presidential versus parliamentary government and a determination of the ultimate role of the National Assembly. These two issues, in turn, are linked by a third — whether the president ought to be elected indirectly by the National Assembly or directly in a mass popular vote. Of these issues, though, the choice between a presidential and a parliamentary system is central, because it requires that we consider the methods whereby chief executives and legislators are elected and, correspondingly, the role of the National Assembly. Beginning, then, with the issue of presidential versus parliamentary government, this essay argues that the most commonly cited arguments over the advisability of choosing one or the other of these two forms are, for the most part, theoretically meaningless and are largely rhetorical devices for rationalizing prejudices about preferred governmental structures and the state's role. Consequently, we attempt here to provide a more useful set of criteria with which to evaluate reform in general and the choice between presidential and parliamentary government in particular. We conclude that although the choice between presidential and parliamentary forms is important, equal attention should be given to the methods whereby a president and the legislature are elected. It is these institutional parameters that determine the character of political parties in Taiwan, their ability to accommodate any mainlander-native Taiwanese conflict, and the likelihood that executive and legislative branches will formulate coherent domestic and international policy."
Rational Voters and Strategic Voting: Evidence from the 1968, 1980, and 1992 Elections
(1994) Ordeshook, Peter C.; Zeng, Langche
"Is the rational choice paradigm more than a mere tautology when applied to the study of voting or can it generate refutable propositions that cannot be deduced or inferred from other approaches? This is the question we address empirically in the context of three-candidate presidential elections. Although we reconfirm the conclusion that the decision to vote is largely a consumptive one, we also establish that once in the voting booth, voters act strategically in precisely the ways predicted by a Downsian model of voting. That is, although expected utility calculations and the like add little to our understanding of the decision to vote, those same calculations have a significant influence on the decision for whom to vote, over and above such things as partisanship."
The Rationality Uniformed Electorate: Some Experimental Evidence
(1988) Collier, Kenneth; Ordeshook, Peter C.; Williams, Kenneth
"This essay reports on a series of twenty four election experiments in which voters are allowed to decide between voting retrospectively and purchasing contemporaneous information about the candidate challenging the incumbent. Each experiment consists of a series of election periods in which dummy candidates choose spatial positions which represent either their policy while in office or a promise about policy if elected. Subjects (voters) are told the value to them of the incumbent's policy, but they must decide, prior to voting, whether or not to purchase information about the value of the challenger's promise. In general, our data conform to reasonable expectations: voters purchase less information and rely more on retrospective knowledge when the candidates' strategies are stable, and their likelihood of purchasing information during periods of instability is tempered by the likelihood that their votes matter, by the reliability of the information available for purchase, and by the degree of instability as measured by changes in each voter's welfare."
Realism Versus Neoliberalism: A Formation
(1989) Niou, Emerson M. S.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Although the debate between realism and neoliberalism offers deep insights and raises fundamental questions into the nature of international systems, it also offers the confusion that accompanies imprecisely formulated concepts and an imperfect application of subsidiary ideas. Using a noncooperative extensive-form game to model anarchic international systems, this essay seeks to resolve that debate by restating it in a more explicit and deductive context. Arguing that collective security corresponds to the system envisioned by neoliberals, we begin by differentiating between balance of power and collective security in terms of the strategies that characterize the foreign policies of countries. Next, we establish that both balance of power and collective security can correspond to equilibria in our game. Arguments about goals and institutions are then recast in terms of the different properties of these equilibria. In particular, a balance of power equilibrium does not guarantee every country's security, so in it countries must be vigilant about their relative share of resources. A collective security equilibrium, on the other hand, ensures everyone's sovereignty, and thereby allows absolute resource maximization. Unlike a balance of power equilibrium, however, a collective security equilibrium is not strong and it is not necessarily perfect, so the institutional structures facilitating the realization of mutual gains from the variety of cooperative 'subgames' characterizing the world economy play a critical role in establishing the stability of that equilibrium."
The Reintegration of Political Science and Economics and the Presumed Imperialism of Economic Theory
(1987) Ordeshook, Peter C.
"No discipline can claim a greater impact on contemporary political theorizing than that of economics, whether that theorizing concerns the study of legislatures, elections, international affairs, or judicial processes. This essay questions, however, whether this impact is a form of 'economic imperialism,' or the logical development of two disciplines whose artificial separation in the first part of this century merely allowed the development and refinement of the rational choice paradigm, unencumbered by the necessity for considering all of reality. Indeed, applications to specific substantive political matters -- most notably collective and cooperative processes where game theory proves most relevant -- reveal the paradigm's incompleteness. These applications, however, illuminate the necessary theoretical extensions, which is no longer the sole domain of the economist."
Russia's Party System: Is Russian Federalism Viable?
(1996) Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Is Russia likely to develop a stable or efficient federal system that matches the definitions of federalism commonly offered in the literature or the descriptions that characterize intergovernmental relations in Germany, Switzerland, or the United States? Unfortunately, our answer to this question is NO. Unlike other discussions of federal relations in Russia - discussions that focus on current economic circumstances, federal treaties, and relations between political elites - we reach this conclusion by taking the view that the extent to which a federal state integrates the functions of different levels of government is determined largely by its political party system and the incentives for cooperation engendered by electoral politics at all levels. Assuming that Russia will continue on the path of democratic reform, we consider the types of parties that are likely to emerge in the long run as a function of Russia's current constitutional structure, current electoral arrangements for choosing a president and a national legislature, and that structure political competition at the regional and local levels. We argue that parties in Russia wil l be more like those found in, say, Canada than in the United States and Germany. Russia's current electoral arrangements, in combination with the political institutional designs of its regional governments - designs that mirror the command and control systems inherited from the Soviet past and which focus power on regional governors - will continue to encourage only the development of a party system that is not only highly fractured at the national level but one that fails to create adequate incentives for cooperation between levels of government. Even if the Russian economy recovers in the next few years or so and even if reformers maintain their position in Moscow, an adversarial relationship will continue to exist between regional and national governments, a relationship that will merely move the state from one crises to the next. We conclude with several suggestions for political reform, including simultaneous election of Duma deputies and president, increased use of elections as a method for filling regional and local public offices, and alternative methods for forming the Federation Council. However, we remain pessimistic about the prospects for a well-functioning federal system since most if not all of these suggestions are unlikely to be pursued as political reforms."
Russia's Transition to Democracy: Essays 11-18
(1993) Nikonov, Vyacheslav A.; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"The eight essays contained herein are the second in a series prepared for translation into Russian and publication in Moscow's Independent Gazette. Their translation into Russian will incorporate a number of details particular to Russia that are not included in the current English versions. In any event, these essays are predicated on the assumption that Russians know democracy only in superficial and sometimes inaccurate ways- that they fail to appreciate the interrelationships of constitutional institutions, of extra-constitutional structures, and of the give-and-take of democratic process that sometimes seems chaotic to those unaccustomed to the interplay of these institutions and structures. Support for this project was provided by the University of Maryland's project on Institutional Reform and The Informal Sector (IRIS). We also would like to thank Olga Shvetsova for her suggestions on topics that require coverage and her comments on the essays' specific content."
Russia, Federalism, and Political Stability
(1995) Ordeshook, Peter C.
"Prepared for the Workshop on Regional Constitutional Design, Moscow, March 13-17, 1995, this essay has two parts — a text in English and one in Russian. The Russian version is a translation of a slightly abbreviated form of the English text and will be published this year in Russia. Our general intent here is two-fold. First, to show the great diversity in U.S. state constitutions to a Russian audience of regional administrators and legislators and to argue that such documents, although not thought of as normal legislation, are unlike national constitutions and serve a somewhat different purpose. The objective here is to convince those who might prepare equivalent documents (charters) for Russia's regions that they need not think of their enterprise in the same terms as when people draft a national constitution. Second, we argue here that federal stability derives from constitutional provisions (federal and regional) other than those dealing explicitly with federal relations. Stability derives as well from the role and organizational structure of political parties, which, in turn, derives from national and regional election laws and from the extent to which regional and local elections are meaningful — the extent to which the offices being filled by such elections control real resources. Insofar as we should be concerned with the stability of the Russian Federation in the long term as well as the short term, then, this essay tries to shift attention from immediate policy disputes and formal federal relations to the overall design of political institutions."
Some Properties of Hare Voting with Strategic Voters
(1991) Ordeshook, Peter C.; Zeng, Langche
"This essay examines some properties of the Single Transferable Vote (Hare Voting) procedure for electing candidates in multi-member districts under the assumption that all voters are strategic. From the perspective of the most common criterion for evaluating voting procedures — the extent to which they ensure the eventual selection of Condorcet winning candidates — the results we offer in this essay can be interpreted as indictments of STV. Even if we restrict preferences by imposing conditions on attitudes towards risk and assume a strong form of separability, STV is not necessarily incentive compatible and strategic voting does not ensure the selection of Condorcet winning candidates or of Condorcet outcomes. This fact, moreover is not dependent on the existence of 'bogus' equilibria — outcomes that exclude Condorcet candidates cannot be avoided under all circumstances even if we limit our analysis to strong or to individually stable equilibria."
The Spatial Analysis of Elections and Committees: Four Decades of Research
(1993) Ordeshook, Peter C.
"The spatial analysis of both committees and elections suffers from a number of deficiencies that are sufficiently serious so as to make it uncomfortable defending that analysis against the charge of having failed to produce the volume of ideas that we could reasonably anticipate in thirty or forty years (for a sense of the rate of progress, the reader can consult my 1976 survey of the literature as it existed in the early 70's and Mueller's 1989 more general survey of Public Choice). Some of these deficiencies, especially those that pertain to the adequacy of a spatial representation of preferences and the limited institutional structures considered, apply to research on both committees and elections. Other deficiencies are unique to one area or the other. On the other hand, I also want to argue that spatial analysis has altered fundamentally the way we think about voting, elections, and parliaments, and that both implicitly and explicitly it contributes much to those who study democratic politics."
Veto Games: Spatial Committees under Unanimity Rule
(1993) Chen, Yan; Ordeshook, Peter C.
"There exists a large literature on two-person bargaining games and distribution games (or divide-the-dollar games) under simple majority rule, where in equilibrium a minimal winning coalition takes full advantage over everyone else. Here we extend the study to an n-person veto game where players take turns proposing policies in an n-dimensional policy space and everybody has a veto over changes in the status quo. Briefly, we find a Nash equilibrium where the initial proposer offers a policy in the intersection of the Pareto optimal set and the Pareto superior set that gives everyone their continuation values, and punishments are never implemented. Comparing the equilibrium outcomes under two different agendas - sequential recognition and random recognition - we find that there are advantages generated by the order of proposal under the sequential recognition rule. We also provide some conditions under which the players will prefer to rotate proposals rather than allow any specific policy to prevail indefinitely."