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In social choice theory, the spatial model of voting is used to simulate the behavior of voters in an election, either to explain voter behavior, or to estimate the likelihood of desirable or undesirable outcomes under different voting systems.: 3
This model positions voters and candidates in a one- or multi-dimensional space, where each dimension represents an attribute of the candidate that voters care about.: 14 Voters are then modeled as having an ideal point in this space, and voting for the nearest candidates to that point.
A political spectrum or compass can therefore be thought of as either an attribute space itself, or as a projection of a higher-dimensional space onto a smaller number of dimensions for simplicity. For example, a study of German voters found that at least four dimensions were required to adequately represent all political parties.