Standard Voting Power Indexes Do Not Work: An Empirical Analysis
By Andrew Gelman, Jonathan N. Katz, Joseph Bafumi. British Journal of Political Science, 2002
152 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Voting power indexes such as that of Banzhaf are derived, explicitly or implicitly, from the assumption that all votes are equally likely (i.e., random voting). That assumption implies that the probability of a vote being decisive in a jurisdiction with n voters is proportional to 1/√n. In this article the authors show how this hypothesis has been empirically tested and rejected using data from various US and European elections. They find that the probability of a decisive vote is approximately proportional to 1/n. The random voting model (and, more generally, the square-root rule) overestimates the probability of close elections in larger jurisdictions. As a result, classical voting power indexes make voters in large jurisdictions appear more powerful than they really are. The most important political implication of their result is that proportionally weighted voting systems (that is, each jurisdiction gets a number of votes proportional to n) are basically fair. This contradicts the claim in the voting power literature that weights should be approximately proportional to √n.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8eb633af94fd681d17686082172287d90b14ef5
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Citations in the corpus
- The portfolio allocation paradox: An investigation into the nature of a very strong but puzzling relationship (2006, background): “In fact, they have been subjected to a variety of criticisms (e.g., Gelman et al. 2003; Saari & Sieberg 2000; Felsenthal & Machover 1998).Note,however,that these measures tend to be theory-laden;e.g.,legislative voting weights alone capture bargaining power as it is understood in most non-cooperat”
- Altruism and Turnout (2006, background): “…theoretically (Chamberlain and Rothchild 1981; Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan 2006; Fischer 1999; Good and Mayer 1975; Tullock 1967) and empirically (Gelman, Katz, and Bafumi 2004; Gelman, King, and Boscardin 1998; Mulligan and Hunter 2003) that P is approximately proportional to 1/N when there is…”