Anonymous Voting Rules with Abstention: Weighted Voting

William S. Zwicker ()
Additional contact information
William S. Zwicker: Union College

A chapter in The Mathematics of Preference, Choice and Order, 2009, pp 239-258 from Springer

Abstract: We consider legislative voting rules that govern collective approval or disapproval of a bill or a motion, and that allow abstention (or absence) as a “middle option” distinct from a yesor novote. In contrast with Peter Fishburn's work on representative systems, or RSs, we do not treat collective approval and disapproval symmetrically; a voting rule may have a built-in bias against passing motions, for example. In this asymmetric case, the additional assumption that a rule is anonymous (all votes count equally) still allows for a significant variety of rules, a number of which are used by real voting bodies (see Freixas & Zwicker (2003)). We provide three characterizations of weighted voting in this context, and discuss potential applications. In real legislative voting bodies an abstention or absence often does have an effect different from a voter's yesor novote. Yet since the publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behaviorvon Neumann & Morgenstern (1949) the standard mathematical model for a legislative voting system has been the simple game, which by virtue of its structure treats any non-yesvote as a no. Peter Fishburns 1973 work seems to be the earliest to have taken abstention seriously, but others followed: Rubenstein (1980); Bolger (1986, 1993a,b); Felsenthal & Machover (1997, 1998); Amer et al. (1998); Freixas & Zwicker (2003); Côrte-Real & Pereira (2004); Dougherty & Edward (2004); Bilbao, Fernández, Jiménez, & López (2005a,b).

Keywords: Vote Rule; Simple Game; Weighted Vote; Vote Game; Relative Majority Rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:spr:stcchp:978-3-540-79128-7_13

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783540791287

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-79128-7_13

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Studies in Choice and Welfare from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().