Reallocating Wasted Votes in Proportional Parliamentary Elections with Thresholds
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866908276950564864 |
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| author | Delemazure, Théo Freeman, Rupert Lang, Jérôme Laslier, Jean-François Peters, Dominik |
| author_facet | Delemazure, Théo Freeman, Rupert Lang, Jérôme Laslier, Jean-François Peters, Dominik |
| contents | In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result in a significant number of "wasted votes" cast for parties that fail to meet the threshold, which reduces representativeness. One proposal is to allow voters to specify replacement votes, by either indicating a second choice party or by ranking a subset of the parties, but there are several ways of deciding on the scores of the parties (and thus the composition of the parliament) given those votes. We introduce a formal model of party voting with thresholds, and compare a variety of party selection rules axiomatically, and experimentally using a dataset we collected during the 2024 European election in France. We identify three particularly attractive rules, called Direct Winners Only (DO), Single Transferable Vote (STV) and Greedy Plurality (GP). |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_17156 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Reallocating Wasted Votes in Proportional Parliamentary Elections with Thresholds Delemazure, Théo Freeman, Rupert Lang, Jérôme Laslier, Jean-François Peters, Dominik Computer Science and Game Theory Theoretical Economics In many proportional parliamentary elections, electoral thresholds (typically 3-5%) are used to promote stability and governability by preventing the election of parties with very small representation. However, these thresholds often result in a significant number of "wasted votes" cast for parties that fail to meet the threshold, which reduces representativeness. One proposal is to allow voters to specify replacement votes, by either indicating a second choice party or by ranking a subset of the parties, but there are several ways of deciding on the scores of the parties (and thus the composition of the parliament) given those votes. We introduce a formal model of party voting with thresholds, and compare a variety of party selection rules axiomatically, and experimentally using a dataset we collected during the 2024 European election in France. We identify three particularly attractive rules, called Direct Winners Only (DO), Single Transferable Vote (STV) and Greedy Plurality (GP). |
| title | Reallocating Wasted Votes in Proportional Parliamentary Elections with Thresholds |
| topic | Computer Science and Game Theory Theoretical Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17156 |