Mathematics and Democracy: Recent Advances in Voting Systems and Collective Choice

by Bruno Simeone (Editor), Friedrich Pukelsheim (Editor)

Overview

In this book, different quantitative approaches to the study of electoral systems have been developed: game-theoretic, decision-theoretic, statistical, probabilistic, combinatorial, geometric, and optimization ones. All the authors are prominent scholars from these disciplines. Quantitative approaches offer a powerful tool to detect inconsistencies or poor performance in actual systems. Applications to concrete settings such as EU, American Congress, regional, and committee voting are discussed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783642071331
Publisher:	Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Publication date:	11/24/2010
Series:	Studies in Choice and Welfare
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st ed. 2006
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.36(d)

Table of Contents

Power Indices Taking into Account Agents’ Preferences.- The Sunfish Against the Octopus: Opposing Compactness to Gerrymandering.- Apportionment: Uni- and Bi-Dimensional.- Minimum Total Deviation Apportionments.- Comparison of Electoral Systems: Simulative and Game Theoretic Approaches.- How to Elect a Representative Committee Using Approval Balloting.- On Some Distance Aspects in Social Choice Theory.- Algorithms for Biproportional Apportionment.- Distance from Consensus: A Theme and Variations.- A Strategic Problem in Approval Voting.- The Italian Bug: A Flawed Procedure for Bi-Proportional Seat Allocation.- Current Issues of Apportionment Methods.- A Gentle Majority Clause for the Apportionment of Committee Seats.- Allotment According to Preferential Vote: Ecuador’s Elections.- Degressively Proportional Methods for the Allotment of the European Parliament Seats Amongst the EU Member States.- Hidden Mathematical Structures of Voting.- A Comparison of Electoral Formulae for the Faroese Parliament.

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews:

"The … book is an edited volume, and exhibits both the flaws and virtues of that genre. … I found the book interesting and important. … the book is well worth having on your shelf. … It would be useful, in fact, as a classroom exercise for students in a variety of disciplines, because it both illustrates the unnatural power of mathematics to illuminate hard questions and unites several apparently unrelated problems in a single analytic rubric. … this is a valuable and important book." (Michael Munger, Public Choice, Vol. 132, 2007)

"This is a fine collection of 17 papers chosen from contributions to the International Workshop on Mathematics and Democracy: Voting Systems and Collective Choice that took place in Erice, Sicily in 2005. … one will walk away from this volume with the sense that one has been exposed to the research frontier of the electoral system theory." (Ugur Ozdemir, Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 31, 2008)

From the Publisher