Abstract
The yolk, the smallest circle which intersects all median lines, has been shown to be an important tool in understanding the nature of majority voting in a spatial voting context. The center of the yolk is a natural ‘center’ of the set of voter ideal points. The radius of the yolk can be used to provide bounds on the size of the feasible set of outcomes of sophisticated voting under standard amendment procedure, and on the limits of agenda manipulation and cycling when voting is sincere. We show that under many plausible conditions the yolk can be expected to be small. Thus, majority rule processes in spatial voting games will be far better behaved than has commonly been supposed, and the possible outcomes of agenda manipulations will be generally constrained. This result was first conjectured by Tullock (1967).
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We are indebted to Helen Wildman, Sue Pursche, Cheryl Larsson, and Maggie Grice of the staff of the Word Processing Center, School of Social Sciences, UC Irvine, and to Gerald Florence and Deanna Knickerbocker of the Center for Adçced Study in the Behavioral Sciences for typing numerous early drafts of this manuscript from hand-scribbled copy, to Cheryl Larsson and Deanna Knickerbocker for preparing the figures, and to Dorothy Gormick for bibliographic assistance. A very early version of a portion of this paper was presented at the Weingart Conference on Formal Models of Voting, California Institute of Technology, 22–23 March 1985. Another earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society, Tucson, Arizona, 27–29 March 1987. We are indebted to participants at those sessions for helpful comments. This research was partially supported by NSF Grant #SES 85-06396 to the second-named author, NSF Grant #SES 85-09680 to the third-named author, and NSF Grant #BNS 8011494 to the Center for Advanced Study where the second-named author was a Fellow in 1985–86.
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Feld, S.L., Grofman, B. & Miller, N. Centripetal forces in spatial voting: On the size of the Yolk. Public Choice 59, 37–50 (1988). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00119448
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00119448