On the democratic weights of nations

TY - JOUR

T1 - On the democratic weights of nations

AU - Kurz, Sascha

AU - Maaser, Nicola

AU - Napel, Stefan

N1 - Funding Information: Napel gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Academy of Finland through the Public Choice Research Centre, Turku. We are grateful to the editor in charge, Harald Uhlig, and three anonymous reviewers who suggested several significant improvements to the paper. We also thank Matthew Braham, Manfred Holler, Ulrich Kamecke, Mario Larch, Publisher Copyright: © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

PY - 2017/10

Y1 - 2017/10

N2 - Which voting weights ought to be allocated to single delegates of differently sized groups from a democratic fairness perspective? We operationalize the one person, one vote principle by demanding every individual’s influence on collective decisions to be equal a priori. The analysis differs from previous ones by considering intervals of alternatives. New reasons lead to an old conclusion: weights should be proportional to the square root of constituency sizes if voter preferences are independent and identically distributed. This finding is fragile, however, in that preference polarization along constituency lines quickly calls for plain proportionality.

AB - Which voting weights ought to be allocated to single delegates of differently sized groups from a democratic fairness perspective? We operationalize the one person, one vote principle by demanding every individual’s influence on collective decisions to be equal a priori. The analysis differs from previous ones by considering intervals of alternatives. New reasons lead to an old conclusion: weights should be proportional to the square root of constituency sizes if voter preferences are independent and identically distributed. This finding is fragile, however, in that preference polarization along constituency lines quickly calls for plain proportionality.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85030177078&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1086/693039

DO - 10.1086/693039

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85030177078

SN - 0022-3808

VL - 125

SP - 1600

EP - 1634

JO - Journal of Political Economy

JF - Journal of Political Economy

IS - 5

ER -