The Mean Voter, the Median Voter, and Welfare-Maximizing Voting Weights

Nicola Maaser () and Stefan Napel
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Nicola Maaser: University of Bremen

A chapter in Voting Power and Procedures, 2014, pp 159-176 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Representatives from differently sized constituencies take political decisions by a weighted voting rule and adopt the ideal point of the weighted median amongst them. Preferences of each representative are supposed to coincide with the constituency’s median voter. The paper investigates how each constituency’s population size should be mapped to a voting weight for its delegate when the objective is to maximize the total expected utility generated by the collective decisions. Depending on the considered utility functions, this is equivalent to approximating the sample mean or median voter of the population by a weighted median of sub-sample medians. Monte Carlo simulations indicate that utilitarian welfare is maximized by a square root rule if the ideal points of voters are all independent and identically distributed. However, if citizens are risk-neutral and their preferences are sufficiently positively correlated within constituencies, i.e., if heterogeneity between constituencies dominates heterogeneity within, then a linear rule performs better.

Keywords: Ideal Point; Median Voter; Allocation Rule; Vote Power; Vote Weight (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-319-05158-1_10

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-05158-1_10

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