Electing the Pope: Elections by Repeated Ballots

Jan Zápal and Clara Ponsatí

No 1553, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: A finite group of voters must elect the pope from a finite set of candidates. They repeatedly cast ballots (possibly for ever) until one candidate attains at least Q votes. A candidate is electable—if enough voters prefer him to a continuous disagreement—as well as stable—if no other candidate is preferred to him by a sufficient number of voters. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a candidate that is both electable and stable. When there are three candidates and voters are willing to compromise somewhat, the condition requires choice by two-thirds supermajority, which coincides with the procedure that the Catholic Church has used to appoint the pope for almost a millennium.

Keywords: conclave; electable; Pope; repeated ballots; stable; supermajority (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D71 D72 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/1553-2.pdf (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:bge:wpaper:1553

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().