SOCIAL CHOICE BY MAJORITY-RULE TO RATIONAL PARTICIPATION

This paper explores the social choice properties of majority rule when voters rationally participate in elections. Employing the basic model of voter behavior developed originally by Ledyard (1984) and Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985), we show that when the electorate is sufficiently large, a participation equilibrium exists and is unique. The main result of the paper shows that under these conditions the social preference ordering induced by majority rule is identical to that given by the expected utility of a randomly selected voter, implying the existence of a Condorcet point in the proposal space. A final section provides intuition for the main theorems and relates the equilibrium of this majority rule game to the median voter result.