Satisfaction Approval Voting

Steven Brams () and D. Marc Kilgour ()
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D. Marc Kilgour: Wilfrid Laurier University

A chapter in Voting Power and Procedures, 2014, pp 323-346 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract We propose a new voting system, satisfaction approval voting (SAV), for multiwinner elections, in which voters can approve of as many candidates or as many parties as they like. However, the winners are not those who receive the most votes, as under approval voting (AV), but those who maximize the sum of the satisfaction scores of all voters, where a voter’s satisfaction score is the fraction of his or her approved candidates who are elected. SAV may give a different outcome from AV—in fact, SAV and AV outcomes may be disjoint—but SAV generally chooses candidates representing more diverse interests than does AV (this is demonstrated empirically in the case of a recent election of the Game Theory Society). A decision-theoretic analysis shows that all strategies under SAV, except approving of a least-preferred candidate, are undominated, so voters may rationally choose to approve of more than one candidate. In party-list systems, SAV apportions seats to parties according to the Jefferson/d’Hondt method with a quota constraint, which favors large parties and gives an incentive to smaller parties to coordinate their policies and forge alliances, even before an election, that reflect their supporters’ coalitional preferences.

Keywords: Satisfaction Score; Approval Vote; Individual Candidate; Large Party; Winning Candidate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Working Paper: Satisfaction approval voting (2010)
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-05158-1_18

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