Dividing the Indivisible: Procedures for Allocating Cabinet Ministries to Political Parties in a Parliamentary System
Political parties in Northern Ireland recently used a divisor method of apportionment to choose, in sequence, ten cabinet ministries. If the parties have complete information about each others' preferences, we show that it may not be rational for them to act sincerely by choosing their most-preferred ministry that is available. One consequence of acting sophisticatedly is that the resulting allocation may not be Pareto-optimal, making all the parties worse off. Another is nonmonotonicty—choosing earlier may hurt rather than help a party. We introduce a mechanism that combines sequential choices with a structured form of trading that results in sincere choices for two parties. Although there are difficulties in extending this mechanism to more than two parties, other approaches are explored, such as permitting parties to making consecutive choices not prescribed by an apportionment method. But certain problems, such as eliminating envy, remain.
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| Date of creation: | Sep 2002 |
| Handle: | RePEc:exe:wpaper:0202 |
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References listed on IDEAS
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- Steven J. Brams & Paul H. Edelman & Peter C. Fishburn, 2003.
"Fair Division Of Indivisible Items,"
Theory and Decision,
Springer, vol. 55(2), pages 147-180, 09.
- Brams, S. J. & Eldelman, P. H. & Fishburn, P. C., 2000. "Fair Division of Indivisible Items," Working Papers 00-15, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University.
- Steven J. Brams & Peter C. Fishburn, 2000. "Fair division of indivisible items between two people with identical preferences: Envy-freeness, Pareto-optimality, and equity," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 17(2), pages 247-267.
- Brams, S.J. & Fishburn, P.C., 1998. "Fair Division of Indivisible Items between Two People with Identical Preferences: Envy-Freeness, Pareto-Optimality, and Equity," Working Papers 98-20, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University.
- Friedrich Pukelsheim & Albert W. Marshall & Ingram Olkin, 2002. "A majorization comparison of apportionment methods in proportional representation," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(4), pages 885-900.
- Carmignani, Fabrizio, 2001. "Cabinet Formation in Coalition Systems," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 48(3), pages 313-329, August.
- Warwick, Paul V. & Druckman, James N., 2001. "Portfolio Salience and the Proportionality of Payoffs in Coalition Governments," British Journal of Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 31(04), pages 627-649, October.
- Dorothea Herreiner & Clemens Puppe, 2002. "A simple procedure for finding equitable allocations of indivisible goods," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 19(2), pages 415-430.
- Edelman, Paul & Fishburn, Peter, 2001. "Fair division of indivisible items among people with similar preferences," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 41(3), pages 327-347, May. Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)