The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desired over a series of binary decisions. By cumulating votes on issues that it deems most important, the minority can win occasionally. But because the majority typically can outvote it, the minority wins only if its strength of preferences is high and the majority's strength of preferences is low. The result is that aggregate efficiency either falls slightly or in fact rises. The theoretical predictions are confirmed by a series of experiments: the frequency of minority victories, the relative payoff of the minority versus the majority, and the aggregate payoffs all match the theory.
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
5278.
Alessandra Casella & Thomas Palfrey & Raymond Riezman, 2005.
"Minorities and Storable Votes,"
NBER Working Papers
11674, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Casella, Alessandra & Palfrey, Thomas R. & Riezman, Raymond, 2006.
"Minorities and storable votes,"
Working Papers
1261, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
[Downloadable!]
Find related papers by JEL classification: C9 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making H1 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government K19 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Other
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Casella, Alessandra & Gelman, Andrew & Palfrey, Thomas R., 2003.
"An Experimental Study of Storable Votes,"
Working Papers
1173, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
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Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)