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The Paradox of Not Voting: Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Stephen V. Stephens*
Affiliation:
Baltimore, Maryland

Extract

It is continually demonstrated in the pages of the Review that formal theorists in political science have great difficulty in communicating with one another, in reaching consensus, e.g., on the rationality of minimal winning coalitions and the effects of vote-trading. It has always puzzled me how such confusion and controversy could surround simple arguments which are—or at least appear to be—mathematical. Reading the extraordinarily clear contribution of Ferejohn and Fiorina (“The Paradox of Not Voting: A Decision Theoretic Analysis,” APSR 68 [June, 1974], 525–536), I am led to the conjecture that a sort of natural selection is involved, that the more lucid papers are so patently silly that many of them fail to achieve publication, leaving the field to papers in which the nonsense is at least obscure.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1975

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