Eric Maskin: Strategic Voting and Majority Rule

The Oxford Department of Economics is pleased to host a talk by Professor Eric Maskin, Nobel Laureate and Adams University Professor at Harvard University, on Strategic Voting and Majority Rule. The event will take place from 4:00pm – 5:00pm on Friday 27 February 2026 in the Lecture Theatre, Manor Road Building.

Strategic Voting and Majority Rule

Where: Lecture Theatre, Manor Road Building, Oxford

When: Friday 27 February 2026, 4:00pm – 5:00pm

 

Register for free here

 

Abstract: We exhibit a voting method for elections that is resistant to strategic voting and elects the majority winner (i.e., the Condorcet winner) when voters’ preferences over candidates are single-peaked, meaning that a voter prefers candidates closer to her in ideology to those further away. Moreover, we show that this system is essentially the unique strategy-resistant method among all voting systems satisfying anonymity (equal treatment of voters) and neutrality (equal treatment of candidates) for single-peaked preferences.

Preferences in actual political elections do not usually adhere strictly to single-peakedness. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that in every state and federal ranked-choice election held in the U.S. to date preferences satisfy a weak form of single-peakedness sufficient to ensure that a slight modification of our voting method remains strategic-resistant.

Thus, we commend this voting system as an especially attractive proposal for voting reform in the United States

 

About the speaker

 

maskin

Eric S. Maskin

Eric Maskin is the Adams University Professor and Professor of Economics and Mathematics at Harvard. He has made contributions to game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, political economy, and other areas of economics.

He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University. He was a faculty member at MIT from 1977-1984, Harvard from 1985- 2000, and the Institute for Advanced Study from 2000-2011. He rejoined the Harvard faculty in 2012. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (with L. Hurwicz and R. Myerson) for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory.

 

 

 

More about this lecture

 

 

 

This talk examines voting systems that are robust to strategic manipulation while still selecting the majority-preferred outcome. Focusing on environments where voter preferences are single-peaked, Professor Maskin presents a voting method that is resistant to strategic voting and uniquely satisfies core principles of fairness, including equal treatment of voters and candidates. The talk also explores how this framework applies beyond idealised settings, showing that even when preferences deviate from strict single-peakedness, the method remains effective.

 

The findings offer important insights for the design of voting systems and contemporary debates on electoral reform.