The Impossibility of a Gerrymander-Proof Representative Democracy
Theoretical Economics
2026-07-06 v1
Abstract
A representative democracy is immune to gerrymandering if it satisfies Chambers' (2008) representative consistency. We examine preference aggregation and show that representative consistency is mutually inconsistent with three other normative desiderata -- efficiency, anonymity, and neutrality. We show this impossibility result both in a setting with ordinal preferences and a setting with expected utility preferences.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.05660,
title = {The Impossibility of a Gerrymander-Proof Representative Democracy},
author = {John Mori},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.05660},
year = {2026}
}