The majoritarian parliamentary electoral system of Canada has been in existence in the same form since the founding of the modern state in 1867. It has been under attack at various levels of government and in the press periodically over the past two decades or so and has not often been defended....

In this paper we examine how individuals should be treated with respect to taxes, subsidies and agenda setting in constitutions in order to obtain efficient allocations of public goods and to limit tax distortions. We show that if public goods are socially desirable, the simple majority rule as...

We study a model of endogenous means testing where households differ in their income and where the in-kind transfer received by each household declines with income. Majority voting determines the two dimensions of public policy: the size of the welfare program and the means-testing rate. We...

We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at hand, thereby irrevocably exercising their right to vote....

The Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem on the manipulability of social-choice rules assumes resoluteness: there are no ties, no multi-member choice sets. Generalizations based on a familiar lottery idea allow ties but assume perfectly shared probabilistic beliefs about their resolution. We prove a...

We consider the Hotelling-Downs model with n ≥ 2 office seeking candidates and runoff voting. We show that Nash equilibria in pure strategies always exist and that there are typically multiple equilibria, both convergent (all candidates are located at the median) and divergent (candidates...

The jury theorem states that based on the aggregation of competences, a group of agents will be the most capable of making the right decisions rather than one individual. However, the jury theorem is based on two restrictive hypotheses, the first being the stochastic independence of decisions....

By using geometry, a fairly complete analysis of Kemeny's rule (KR) is obtained. It is shown that the Borda Count (BC) always ranks the KR winner above the KR loser, and, conversely, KR always ranks the BC winner above the BC loser. Such KR relationships fail to hold for other positional...

This paper both theoretically and experimentally studies the properties of plurality and approval voting when the majority is divided as a result of information imperfections. The minority backs a third alternative, which the majority views as strictly inferior. The majority thus faces two...

A coin flip can be a good way to settle an election if the margin of victory is small and it is known that there is a good chance of fraud by one candidate. In that case, however, an even better rule is to award victory to the apparent loser