Related papers: In This Apportionment Lottery, the House Always Wi…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…
The problem of how to allocate to states the seats in the US House of Representatives is the most studied instance of what is termed the `apportionment problem'. We propose a new method of apportionment which is stochastic, which meets the…
The apportionment problem constitutes a fundamental problem in democratic societies: How to distribute a fixed number of seats among a set of states in proportion to the states' populations? This--seemingly simple--task has led to a rich…
Apportionment is the task of assigning resources to entities with different entitlements in a fair manner, and specifically a manner that is as proportional as possible. The best-known application is the assignment of parliamentary seats to…
In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by…
Apportionment refers to the well-studied problem of allocating legislative seats among parties or groups with different entitlements. We present a multi-level generalization of apportionment where the groups form a hierarchical structure,…
How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with…
In parliamentary elections, parties compete for a limited, typically fixed number of seats. Most parliaments are assembled using apportionment methods that distribute the seats based on the parties' vote counts. Common apportionment methods…
Traditionally, the problem of apportioning the seats of a legislative body has been viewed as a one-shot process with no dynamic considerations. While this approach is reasonable for some settings, dynamic aspects play an important role in…
In the classic apportionment problem the goal is to decide how many seats of a parliament should be allocated to each party as a result of an election. The divisor methods provide a way of solving this problem by defining a notion of…
Divisor methods are well known to satisfy house monotonicity, which allows representative seats to be allocated sequentially. We focus on stationary divisor methods defined by a rounding cutpoint $c \in [0,1]$. For such methods with…
The apportionment problem deals with the fair distribution of a discrete set of $k$ indivisible resources (such as legislative seats) to $n$ entities (such as parties or geographic subdivisions). Highest averages methods are a frequently…
We consider three algorithms for allocating parliamentary seats by proportional representation. The usual approach to describing such algorithms is to compute a quota of votes that each party uses to "acquire'' representatives. This kind of…
The Constitutionally mandated task of assigning Congressional seats to the various U.S. States proportional to their represented populations ("according to their numbers") has engendered much contention, but rather less consensus. Using the…
We establish a link between multiwinner elections and apportionment problems by showing how approval-based multiwinner election rules can be interpreted as methods of apportionment. We consider several multiwinner rules and observe that…
Sortition is based on the idea of choosing randomly selected representatives for decision making. The main properties that make sortition particularly appealing are fairness -- all the citizens can be selected with the same probability --…
Most democratic countries use election methods to transform election results into whole numbers which usually give the number of seats in a legislative body the parties obtained. Which election method does this best can be specified by…
Proportional apportionment is the problem of assigning seats to parties according to their relative share of votes. Divisor methods are the de-facto standard solution, used in many countries. In recent literature, there are two algorithms…
Every representative democracy must specify a mechanism under which voters choose their representatives. The most common mechanism in the United States -- Winner takes all single-member districts -- both enables substantial partisan…
Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p_1,...,p_m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a…