Related papers: On Penrose's square-root law and beyond

We consider a model where a subset of candidates must be selected based on voter preferences, subject to general constraints that specify which subsets are feasible. This model generalizes committee elections with diversity constraints,…

A new viewpoint on electoral involvement is proposed from the study of the statistics of the proportions of abstentionists, blank and null, and votes according to list of choices, in a large number of national elections in different…

Important decisions are likely made by groups of agents. Thus group decision making is very common in practice. Very transparent group aggregating rules are given by weighted voting, where each agent is assigned a weight. Here a proposal is…

This paper presents mathematics relevant to the question whether voting should be mandatory. Assuming a static distribution of voters' political beliefs, we model how politicians might adjust their positions to raise their share of the…

We examine the determinants of the EU budget expenditures allocation among different countries. In line with earlier literature, we consider two alternative explanations for the EU budget distribution: political power vs. needs view.…

Some argue that political stability is best served through a two-party system. This study refutes this. The author mathematically defines the stability and rigidity of electoral systems comprised of any quantity of electors and parties. In…

We study the health consequences of redistributing political power through the 1975 extension of the Voting Rights Act, which eliminated barriers to voting for previously disenfranchised nonwhite populations. The intervention led to broad…

Quadratic Voting (QV) is a social choice mechanism that addresses the "tyranny of the majority" of one-person-one-vote mechanisms. Agents express not only their preference ordering but also their preference intensity by purchasing $x$ votes…

The principle of democracy is that the people govern through elected representatives. Therefore, a democracy is healthy as long as the elected politicians do represent the people. We have analyzed data from the Brazilian electoral court…

In this contribution, we construct a connection between two quantum voting models presented previously. We propose to try to determine the result of a vote from associated given opinion polls. We introduce a density operator relative to the…

Quantum experiments yield random data. We show that the most efficient way to store this empirical information by a finite number of bits is by means of the vector of square roots of observed relative frequencies. This vector has the unique…

We propose a model for diffusion of two opposite opinions. Here, the decision to be taken by each individual is a random variable which depends on the tendency of the population, as well on its own trend characteristic. The influence of the…

Square roots of probabilities appear in several contexts, which suggests that they are somehow more fundamental than probabilities. Square roots of probabilities appear in expressions of the Fisher-Rao Metric and the Hellinger-Bhattacharyya…

Ethnic-based political inequality is widespread, yet its underlying drivers remain poorly understood. This paper shows that an ethnic group's relative size is a key correlate of its access to central executive power. Using data on 575…

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…

We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the ``correct''…

State delegations are often chosen through single-member district elections, creating a tension between respecting district majorities and reflecting the statewide electorate. First-past-the-post (FPTP) follows each district's majority but…

We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…

Weighted voting games are a popular class of coalitional games that are widely used to model real-life situations of decision-making. They can be applied, for instance, to analyze legislative processes in parliaments or voting in corporate…

Limited Voting (LV) is an approval-based method for multi-winner elections where all ballots are required to have a same fixed size. While it appears to be used as voting method in corporate governance and has some political applications,…