The Multilingual Election Problem

Abstract

Multilingual elections may democratically enfranchise linguistic minorities, or may promote extremist, uncompromising, clientelistic, inefficient politics. One theoretical approach to this question extends existing spatial models of elections, allowing candidates to state different positions in different languages and assuming that language barriers give voters incomplete information about the positions stated in their non-native languages. In a simple model of multilingual campaigning, candidates under some conditions can state different positions in different languages so that every voter aggregates the positions into a perception coinciding exactly with the voter's own position. To do this, candidates must choose positions more extreme than the positions of the respective audiences. As groups gain multilingual fluency, candidate extremism further increases. Extremism is vote-maximizing unless voters sufficiently penalize inconsistency. When inconsistency is important enough, candidates consistently take the position of the larger group in 2-group elections, and of the ideologically central group in 3-group elections.