Sincere voting in an electorate with heterogeneous preferences

Much of the theoretical literature on voting with private information finds that voters do not vote sincerely at the equilibrium. Yet there is little empirical support for this result. This paper shows that when the electorate is sufficiently divided, sincere voting is an equilibrium strategy for an arbitrarily large proportion of voters. •Voters need to choose between a reform and the status quo.•There is a binary state of the world, and voters receive private signals about it.•Some voters prefer the reform in the first state, others – in the second.•When fractionalisation is sufficiently high, an equilibrium exists in which almost all voters vote sincerely.