A New Perspective on Impartial and Unbiased Apportionment

Ross Hyman and Nicolaus Tideman

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: How to fairly apportion congressional seats to states has been debated for centuries. We present an alternative perspective on apportionment, centered not on states but "families" of state, sets of states with "divisor-method" quotas with the same integer part. We develop ``impartial" and ``unbiased" apportionment methods. Impartial methods apportion the same number of seats to families of states containing the same total population, whether a family consists of many small-population states or a few large-population states. Unbiased methods apportion seats so that if states are drawn repeatedly from the same distribution, the expected number of seats apportioned to each family equals the expected divisor-method quota for that family.

Date: 2022-01, Revised 2022-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11787 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:2201.11787

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().