A new approach to understand the equilibrium of the voting behaviors and candidates' strategies in the election

Abstract This paper proposes a hotelling-downs style election competition model to describe the location choice in the political continuum of the political parties using the game theory. Compared to conventional models which only consider two homogeneous parities, this model allows the heterogeneous abilities between two parties and it finds that the party in advantage tends to move to the middle of the continuum while its opposite party tends to be more extreme. Then it turns to three-candidate election where the level of strategic voting depends on the quality of information-how accurate the voters know the votes of each candidate from the survey polls. The candidate in the middle of the continuum can win the election only when it is much better than the other two candidates that there are supporters of either of them strategically vote to it. Finally, the paper applies the model to analyse the elections in Taiwan. It finds that the quality of the information of the election accessible to the voters is relatively high and strategic voting is a common phenomenon since 2012. Therefore, controlling the quality of the information to voters can be a strategy to win the election in the three-candidate election.