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Using factions to estimate preference intensity: Improving upon one person/one vote

✍ Scribed by Robert F. Bordley


Book ID
104631118
Publisher
Springer US
Year
1985
Tongue
English
Weight
449 KB
Volume
45
Category
Article
ISSN
0048-5829

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis


In many elections, individuals are given two alternatives and are asked to indicate which of the two they prefer. These votes are then tabulated using one person/one vote and the alternative with the most votes becomes the public choice.

Can we improve upon this system? If we change the election system and get more information on voter preference intensities, there are a number of better systems: demand revelation schemes, logrolling, Borda Voting etc. But suppose we can't change the way in which voters cast their ballots; suppose we are only allowed to change the way in which votes are tabulated. Is there a better system? Generally there is one extra bit of information -usually considered incidental -which comes with an individual's vote: his voting address. But voting address tells us something about the interest groups to which the individual may belong. As this paper shows, we can use this information to devise a better way of tabulating votes. This new system generally gives individuals from moderately cohesive voting regions more voting weight than individuals from either mildly cohesive or highly cohesive voting regions.


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