Asymptotic bias of some election methods

Svante Janson ()

Annals of Operations Research, 2014, vol. 215, issue 1, 89-136

Abstract: Consider an election where N seats are distributed among parties with proportions p 1 ,…,p m of the votes. We study, for the common divisor and quota methods, the asymptotic distribution, and in particular the mean, of the seat excess of a party, i.e. the difference between the number of seats given to the party and the (real) number Np i that yields exact proportionality. Our approach is to keep p 1 ,…,p m fixed and let N→∞, with N random in a suitable way. In particular, we give formulas showing the bias favouring large or small parties for the different election methods. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2014

Keywords: Proportional election methods; Divisor methods; Quota methods; Bias; Probability of violating quota; Apparentements (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-012-1141-2

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