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Minorities and Storable Votes

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Listed:
  • Alessandra Casella
  • Thomas Palfrey
  • Raymond Riezman

Abstract

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 desidered 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 of its strength of preferences is high and the majority's strength of preferences is low. The result is that aggregate efficiency either falls little 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.

Suggested Citation

  • Alessandra Casella & Thomas Palfrey & Raymond Riezman, 2005. "Minorities and Storable Votes," NBER Working Papers 11674, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
  • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11674
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Gerber, Elisabeth R. & Morton, Rebecca B. & Rietz, Thomas A., 1998. "Minority Representation in Multimember Districts," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 92(1), pages 127-144, March.
    2. Rafael Hortala-Vallve, 2012. "Qualitative voting," Journal of Theoretical Politics, , vol. 24(4), pages 526-554, October.
    3. Casella, Alessandra, 2005. "Storable votes," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 51(2), pages 391-419, May.
    4. Casella, Alessandra & Gelman, Andrew & Palfrey, Thomas R., 2006. "An experimental study of storable votes," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 123-154, October.
    5. Paul R. Milgrom & Robert J. Weber, 1985. "Distributional Strategies for Games with Incomplete Information," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 10(4), pages 619-632, November.
    6. McLennan, Andrew, 1998. "Consequences of the Condorcet Jury Theorem for Beneficial Information Aggregation by Rational Agents," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 92(2), pages 413-418, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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    More about this item

    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

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