More Borda Count Variations for Project Assesment

We introduce and analyze the following variants of the Borda rule: median Borda rule,geometric Borda rule, Litvak’s method as well as methods based on forming linear combinations of entries in the preference outranking matrix. The properties we focus upon are the elimination of the Condorcet loser as well as several consistency-type criteria.Borda rule, median rule, Nash welfare function, outranking matrix, maximin rule, consistency

Voting Weights or Agenda Control: Which One Really Matters?

Much of the EU institution literature deals with the distribution of voting power in the Council and European Parliament. The increasingly sophisticated models on EU decision making tend to overlook issues pertaining agenda formation and control in various decision making bodies. This article argues that agenda control is extremely important in all collective decision making bodies. Indeed, agenda control may render the voting power distribution issue largely irrelevant.Agenda control, amendment procedure, no-show paradox, successive procedure

Models of Political Economy

Models of Political Economy will introduce students to the basic methodology of political economics. It covers all core theories as well as new developments including: decision theory game theory mechanism design games of asymmetric information. Hannu Nurmi's text will prove to be invaluable to all students who wish to understand this increasingly technical field

Remarks on "The Future Viability of the Dutch Democracy"

Abstract: The democratic pillar of the Dutch Constitution is discussed under three headings: (1) electoral system and the proposed changes in it, (2) the measures proposed to enhance governability through counteracting fragmentation of the parliament and (3) initiatives to encourage political participation. Due to the systemic nature of the Constitution it is difficult to improve the performance of one component without deteriorating that of another; governability can be increased by creating obstacles for representation, but this is likely to lower the rate of participation. </p

The incidence of some voting paradoxes under domain restrictions

Voting paradoxes have played an important role in the theory of voting. They typically say very little about the circumstances in which they are particularly likely or unlikely to occur. They are basically existence findings. In this article we study some well known voting paradoxes under the assumption that the underlying profiles are drawn from the Condorcet domain, i.e. a set of preference profiles where a Condorcet winner exists. The motivation for this restriction is the often stated assumption that profiles with a Condorcet winner are more likely than those without it. We further restrict the profiles by assuming that the starting point of our analysis is that the Condorcet winner coincides with the choice of the voting rule under scrutiny. The reason for making this additional restriction is that - intuitively - the outcomes that coincide with the Condorcet winner make those outcomes stable and, thus, presumably less vulnerable to various voting paradoxes. It will be seen that this is, indeed, the case for some voting rules and some voting paradoxes, but not for all of them.</p

Tieteestä apua riitojen sovitteluun

Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor: The Win-Win Solution. Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody. New York 1999. W.W. Norton, 177 s

Voting theory: cui bono?

The theory of voting has largely developed independently of the mechanism design research, but with the introduction of the concept of strategic voting the two traditions found a common ground. This happened some fifty years ago. Yet, despite the voluminous literature that has emerged since then, the impact of voting theory to the design of political institutions remains marginal. Often the assumptions are deemed too simplistic or too abstract or plainly `out of this world'. It looks as if there is a demand for research that aims at building bridges over the wide gap that exists between the abstract social choice results and the behavioral-institutional realities characterizing political systems of today and tomorrow.  We illustrate the applicability problems by discussing a relatively recent proposal for electoral reform of the single-member constituency system in electing the members for the House of Representatives in the United States. The proposed reform would seem to solve a major flaw in the existing system.  As is often the case, this comes with a price, though: the proposal is plagued with problems of its own. However, the voting theory results have a wide area of applicability beyond voting. Yet the applicability of the voting theory results in these areas have remained largely unexplored. This article aims at suggesting some applications.  Most straight-forward ones pertain to multiple-criterion decision making. </p

Social choice, stable outcomes and deliberative democracy

It has turned out that all voting rules fail on some intuitively plausible desiderata. This has led some political scientists to argue that the notion of the will of the people is profoundly ambiguous and the absence of voting equilibria a generic state of affairs. As a constructive remedy to this some authors have introduced the idea of deliberative democracy.  This view of democracy has much to recommend itself, most importantly the emphasis on individuals in devising the decision alternatives. Some empirical evidence also suggests that the deliberative institutions provide an escape from some of the most notorious incompatibility results in social choice theory. We shall critically examine this suggestion. The view emerging from this examination is that social choice theory and deliberative democracy are complementary, not competing approaches to democratic decision making.</p