Multi winner Approval Voting: An Apportionment Approach

Steven Brams (), D. Marc Kilgour and Richard F. Potthoff

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We extend approval voting so as to elect multiple candidates, who may be either individuals or members of a political party, in rough proportion to their approval in the electorate. We analyze two divisor methods of apportionment, first proposed by Jefferson and Webster, that iteratively depreciate the approval votes of voters who have one or more of their approved candidates already elected. We compare the usual sequential version of these methods with a nonsequential version, which is computationally complex but feasible for many elections. Whereas Webster apportionments tend to be more representative of the electorate than those of Jefferson, the latter, whose equally spaced vote thresholds for winning seats duplicate those of cumulative voting in 2-party elections, is even-handed or balanced.

Keywords: Approval voting; apportionment methods; multiple winners; proportional representation; cumulative voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C6 C63 C7 C72 C8 D6 D63 D7 D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gth and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/77931/1/MPRA_paper_77931.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Multiwinner approval voting: an apportionment approach (2019)
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:pra:mprapa:77931

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().