Plurality voting versus proportional representation in the citizen‐candidate model

We contrast the effect of plurality voting and proportional representation (PR) on candidates’ entry behavior. We do so using the citizen-candidate paradigm (Osborne and Slivinski, 1996 and Besley and Coate, 1997). To this aim we introduce a new way of modeling PR that takes coalitions explicitly into account and compare the equilibria to those under plurality voting and PR without coalitions (Hamlin and Hjortlund, 2000). We find that (i) taking coalitions into accounts reduces candidate polarization; (ii) for policy-motivated candidates PR leads to more polarized entrants; (iii) for office-motivated candidates PR with coalitions is most conducive to multi-candidate equilibria. We complement the theoretical analysis with data from a laboratory experiment comparing plurality voting and PR without coalitions. In line with theoretical predictions we find that higher costs of entry lead to fewer entrants that are more centrist and that PR leads to weakly more entry than plurality.