Protecting Minorities in Binary Elections: A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data

Alessandra Casella (), Shuky Ehrenberg (), Andrew Gelman () and jie shen ()
Additional contact information
Shuky Ehrenberg: Columbia University - Department of Economics
Andrew Gelman: Columbia University - Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science

No 0708-14, Discussion Papers from Columbia University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is storable votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra bonus vote, had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15-30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85-95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Date: 2008
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.econ.columbia.edu/RePEc/pdf/DP0708-14.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Protecting Minorities in Binary Elections. A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data (2008)
Working Paper: Protecting Minorities in Binary Elections: A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:clu:wpaper:0708-14

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Columbia University, Department of Economics
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Discussion Paper Coordinator ().