Probabilistic voting theory

Peter J. Coughlin's book is a mathematical study of how candidates behave when they cannot be sure what voters want. It offers an integrated treatment of probabilistic voting models and extends the author's own earlier contributions to them.

The subject is the mathematical theory of candidate conduct, both during an election and beforehand in anticipation of one. Uncertainty about voter preferences on all or most issues is the normal situation in most governmental elections. The theory first asks whether candidates can determine optimal strategies despite that uncertainty and, if they can, what those strategies are under different circumstances. From these answers, it predicts which public policies will gain support, which laws elected officials will pass once in office, and which positions they will take when running for election.

Coughlin is one of the leading contributors to this fast-developing literature, which sits at the forefront of public choice theory. The book reviews the existing work and presents new results that unify and extend ideas that had appeared scattered across the literature.