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Balanced Voting

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We introduce `Balanced Voting', a new voting scheme that is particularly suitable for making fundamental societal decisions. Such decisions typically involve subgroups that are strongly in favor of, or against, a new fundamental direction, and others that care much less. In a two-stage procedure, Balanced Voting works as follows: Citizens may abstain from voting on a fundamental direction in a first stage. In a second voting stage, this guarantees them a voting right on the variations of the fundamental direction chosen in the first. All ‘losers’ from the first stage also obtain voting rights in the second stage, while ‘winners’ do not. We develop a model with two fundamental directions for which stakes are high for some individuals and with private information about preferences among voters. We demonstrate that Balanced Voting is superior to simple majority voting, Storable Votes and Minority Voting with regard to utilitarian welfare if the voting body is sufficiently large. Moreover, the outcome under Balanced Voting is Pareto-dominant to the outcome under simple majority voting and Minority Voting. We discuss several aspects that need to be considered when Balanced Voting is applied in practice. We also suggest how Balanced Voting could be applied to elections.

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  • Hans Gersbach & Kamali Wickramage, 2015. "Balanced Voting," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 15/209, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich.
  • Handle: RePEc:eth:wpswif:15-209
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    1. Fahrenberger, Theresa & Gersbach, Hans, 2010. "Minority voting and long-term decisions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 69(2), pages 329-345, July.
    2. Alessandra Casella & Thomas Palfrey & Raymond Riezman, 2013. "Minorities and Storable Votes," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Raymond Riezman (ed.), International Trade Agreements and Political Economy, chapter 15, pages 247-282, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    3. Cesar Martinelli & Thomas R. Palfrey, 2017. "Communication and Information in Games of Collective Decision: A Survey of Experimental Results," Working Papers 1065, George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science.
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    5. Freer, Mikhail & Martinelli, César & Wang, Siyu, 2020. "Collective experimentation: A laboratory study," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 365-379.
    6. Casella, Alessandra, 2005. "Storable votes," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 391-419, May.
    7. Rafael Hortala-Vallve, 2012. "Qualitative voting," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 24(4), pages 526-554, October.
    8. Philipson, Tomas J & Snyder, James M, Jr, 1996. "Equilibrium and Efficiency in an Organized Vote Market," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 89(3-4), pages 245-265, December.
    9. Matthew O Jackson & Hugo F Sonnenschein, 2007. "Overcoming Incentive Constraints by Linking Decisions -super-1," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 75(1), pages 241-257, January.
    10. Fahrenberger, Theresa C. & Gersbach, Hans, 2012. "Preferences for harmony and minority voting," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 1-13.
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Balanced Voting; fundamental decision; tyranny of majority; minority protection;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making

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