Consistent Representative Democracy

Christopher Chambers

No 1217, Working Papers from California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract: We study axioms which define "representative democracy" in an environment in which agents vote over a finite set of alternatives. We focus on a property that states that whether votes are aggregated directly or indirectly make no difference. We call this property 'representative consistency'. 'Representative consistency' formalizes the idea that a voting rule should be immune to gerrymandering. We characterize the class of rules satisfying 'unanimity, anonymity,' and 'representative consistency'. We call these rules "partial priority rules." A partial priority rule can be interpreted as a rule in which each agent can "veto" certain alternatives. We investigate the implications of imposing other axioms to the list specified above. We also study the partial priority rules in the context of specific economic models.

Keywords: social choice; representative systems; majority rule; gerrymandering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2005-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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Journal Article: Consistent representative democracy (2008)
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