Why Does Voting Get so Complicated?

✍ Scribed by Gill J., Gainous J.

• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 23
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Statistical Science, Vol. 17, No. 4, Voting and Elections (Nov., 2002), pp. 383-404
Published by: Institute of Mathematical Statistics

A Review of Theories for Analyzing Democratic Participation

The purpose of this article is to present a sample from the panoply of formal theories on voting and elections to Statistical Science readers who have had limited exposure to such work. These abstract ideas provide a frameworkf or understandingt he context of the empiricala rticlest hat follow in this volume. The primary focus of this theoretical literature is on the use of mathematical formalism to describe electoral systems and outcomes by modeling both voting rules and human behavior. As with empirical models, these constructs are never perfect descriptors of reality, but instead form the basis for understanding fundamental characteristics of the studied system. Our focus is on providing a general, but not overly simplified, review of these theories with practical examples. We end the article with a thought experiment that applies different vote aggregation schemes to the 2000 presidential election count in Florida, and we find that alternative methods provide different results.

Conents

Vote aggregation and group preferences
Underlying theoretical and practicl principles
institutional voting system
Ironies and complexities of preference aggregation
Spatial models of voting
Probablistic voting models
Cost-benefit models of voting
The outcome of 2002 US presidential election under differing systems

✦ Subjects

Политические дисциплины;Политология;Выборы и избирательные технологии