In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrow's theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrow's theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation of...

The constitutions of the Bretton Woods Institutions require decisions to be taken by weighted voting: each member country possesses a number of votes, depending on its quota allocation, all of which must always be cast as a bloc. This leads to a problem of democratic legitimacy since a member's...

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...

A majority of truth-seeking voters wants to choose the alternative that better matches the state of the world, but may disagree on its identity due to private information. When we have an arbitrary number of alternatives and also sophisticated partisan voters exist in the electorate, the...

The nonasymptotic Condorcet jury theorem states that, under certain conditions, group decision-making by simple majority voting can decide more efficiently than single-person decision-making, in terms of having a higher probability of choosing the better alternative. Wit (1998) showed that the...

Prominent theory research on voting uses models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many individuals turn out for reasons unrelated to...

Numerous theoretical studies have shown that information aggregation through voting is fragile. We consider a model of information aggregation with vote-contingent payoffs and generically characterize voting behavior in large committees. We use this characterization to identify the set of...

We design an experiment to test how voters vote in a small committee election with three alternatives. Voters have common preferences that depend on an unknown state of nature. Each voter receives an imprecise private signal prior to the election and then casts a vote. The alternative with the...

Despite the wide variety of agendas used in legislative settings, the literature on sophisticated voting has focused on two formats, the so-called Euro-Latin and Anglo-American agendas. In the current paper, I introduce a broad class of agendas whose defining structural features,...

We explore the possibility of axiomatic characterization of approval voting when the set of voters is fixed and each voter has a dichotomous preference over the alternatives. We first prove that if the set of alternatives is variable, a social choice rule is approval voting if and only if it...