Approval voting and positional voting methods: Inference, relationship, examples

Michel Regenwetter () and Ilia Tsetlin ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2004, vol. 22, issue 3, 539-566

Abstract: Approval voting is the voting method recently adopted by the Society for Social Choice and Welfare. Positional voting methods include the famous plurality, antiplurality, and Borda methods. We extend the inference framework of Tsetlin and Regenwetter (2003) from majority rule to approval voting and all positional voting methods. We also establish a link between approval voting and positional voting methods whenever Falmagne et al.’s (1996) size-independent model of approval voting holds: In all such cases, approval voting mimics some positional voting method. We illustrate our inference framework by analyzing approval voting and ranking data, with and without the assumption of the size-independent model. For many of the existing data, including the Society for Social Choice and Welfare election analyzed by Brams and Fishburn (2001) and Saari (2001), low turnout implies that inferences drawn from such elections carry low (statistical) confidence. Whenever solid inferences are possible, we find that, under certain statistical assumptions, approval voting tends to agree with positional voting methods, and with Borda, in particular. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-003-0232-z (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:22:y:2004:i:3:p:539-566

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-003-0232-z

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().