A comparative analysis of sincere and sophisticated voting under the plurality and approval procedures

This article focuses on decision making by voting in systems at the levels of the organization, the community, the society, and the international system. It examines the compatibility of the plurality and approval voting procedures with a number of normative properties commonly used to evaluate the desirability of voting procedures by social choice theorists. This analysis assumes both sincere and sophisticated voting under each procedure and thus extends previous analyses of the same issues which were restricted to sincere voting. We show that neither sophisticated plurality voting nor sophisticated approval voting is compatible with any of the normative properties under examination. This is so despite the fact that the sincere versions of these voting procedures satisfy most of these properties. We relate our findings to other theoretical and empirical examinations of these issues and discuss the possible implications of the violations for actual implementation of these procedures.