Related papers: Misrepresentation in District-Based Elections
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…
Proportional representation (PR) is often discussed in voting settings as a major desideratum. For the past century or so, it is common both in practice and in the academic literature to jump to single transferable vote (STV) as the…
When delegations to an assembly or council represent differently sized constituencies, they are often allocated voting weights which increase in population numbers (EU Council, US Electoral College, etc.). The Penrose square root rule…
Proportional representation (PR) has long been believed the ideal system for the equality of individuals in apportioning the seats of a legislature body to subgroups. We observe that PR implicitly assumes the (standard) number of…
Partisan gerrymandering, i.e., manipulation of electoral district boundaries for political advantage, is one of the major challenges to election integrity in modern day democracies. Yet most of the existing methods for detecting partisan…
Criteria for a good voting system have been given particularly careful scrutiny in recent years, with general agreement that the core values are fair results, voter power and choice, and local representation. This paper reexamines the basic…
Proportional representation (PR) is one of the central principles in voting. Elegant rules with compelling PR axiomatic properties have the potential to be adopted for several important collective decision making settings. I survey some…
In a representative democracy, the electoral process involves partitioning geographical space into districts which each elect a single representative. These representatives craft and vote on legislation, incentivizing political parties to…
In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result…
We develop a theory of distributive competition under redistricting that explains both electoral outcomes and the equilibrium allocation of policy benefits by endogenizing voter pivotality. In a multi-district model with primaries, general…
Many people believe that it is disadvantageous for members aligning with a minority party to cluster in cities, as this makes it easier for the majority party to gerrymander district boundaries to diminish the representation of the…
American democracy is currently heavily reliant on plurality in single-member districts, or PSMD, as a system of election. But public perceptions of fairness are often keyed to partisan proportionality, or the degree of congruence between…
Partisan gerrymandering is a major cause for voter disenfranchisement in United States. However, convincing US courts to adopt specific measures to quantify gerrymandering has been of limited success to date. Recently, Stephanopoulos and…
In multiwinner approval voting, forming a committee that proportionally represents voters' approval ballots is an essential task. The notion of justified representation (JR) demands that any large "cohesive" group of voters should be…
We investigate the distribution of partisanship in a cross-section of ten diverse States to elucidate how votes translate into seats won and other metrics. Markov chain simulations taking into account partisanship distribution agree…
We consider the following problem in which a given number of items has to be chosen from a predefined set. Each item is described by a vector of attributes and for each attribute there is a desired distribution that the selected set should…
The goal of multi-winner elections is to choose a fixed-size committee based on voters' preferences. An important concern in this setting is representation: large groups of voters with cohesive preferences should be adequately represented…
The comparison of subnational areas is ubiquitous but survey samples of these areas are often biased or prohibitively small. Researchers turn to methods such as multilevel regression and poststratification (MRP) to improve the efficiency of…
To assess the presence of gerrymandering, one can consider the shapes of districts or the distribution of votes. The "efficiency gap," which does the latter, plays a central role in a 2016 federal court case on the constitutionality of…
We consider two symmetry metrics commonly used to analyze partisan gerrymandering: the Mean-Median Difference (MM) and Partisan Bias (PB). Our main results compare, for combinations of seats and votes achievable in districted elections, the…