Referendum paradox in a federal union with unequal populations: the three state case

Dominique Lepelley, Vincent Merlin (), Jean-louis Rouet () and Laurent Vidu ()
Additional contact information
Jean-louis Rouet: ISTO UMR 7327 - CNRS/ISTU - BRGM - Université d''Orléans
Laurent Vidu: CREM, Université de Caen

Economics Bulletin, 2014, vol. 34, issue 4, 2201-2207

Abstract: In a federal union, a referendum paradox occurs each time a decision taken by representatives elected in separate jurisdictions (districts, states, regions) conflicts with the decision that would have been adopted if the voters had directly given their opinion via a referendum (Nurmi 1999). Assuming that the population is split into three jurisdictions of respective size n1, n2 and n3, we derive exact formulas for the probability of the referendum paradox under the Impartial Culture model. Then we use these results to show that, in our model, allocating seats to the juridictions proportionally to the square root of their size is an apportionment rule that fails to minimize the probability of the referendum paradox in some federations.

Keywords: federalism; indirect voting; apportionment; paradoxes; probability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10-24
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/Pubs/EB/2014/Volume34/EB-14-V34-I4-P201.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Referendum paradox in a federal union with unequal populations: the three state case (2014)
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:ebl:ecbull:eb-14-00642

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().