The Potential of Cumulative Voting To Yield Fair Representation

Duane A. Cooper
Additional contact information
Duane A. Cooper: Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, dcooper@morehouse.edu

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2007, vol. 19, issue 3, 277-295

Abstract: We prove that cumulative voting usually enables a minority population to achieve political representation corresponding to apportionment by Webster's method, which minimizes the absolute difference of per capita representation between the minority and the remaining majority population. The minority, of arbitrary size, can generally attain its `Webster-fair' share of n seats with probability greater than 75 per cent and otherwise, with probability at most 4 n/n+1 1 the minority can attain just one seat less than its Webster-fair representation. Furthermore, for two subpopulations, the potential representation yielded by cumulative voting is identical to that obtained from apportionment by Jefferson's method, and for more than two subpopulations the potential representation by cumulative voting cannot be greater than that of Jefferson apportionment. These results confirm the potential of cumulative voting to yield representation proportional or nearly proportional to population, and the results counter claims or concerns that cumulative voting would be unfairly advantageous to minority populations.

Keywords: apportionment; cumulative voting; fair representation; minority representation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951629807077570 (text/html)

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:sae:jothpo:v:19:y:2007:i:3:p:277-295

DOI: 10.1177/0951629807077570

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().