Protecting Minorities in Binary Elections: A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data

33 Pages Posted: 22 Jun 2008 Last revised: 16 Jul 2022

See all articles by Alessandra Casella

Alessandra Casella

Columbia University - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Economics; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Shuky Ehrenberg

Yale University - Law School; Columbia University - Department of Economics

Andrew Gelman

Columbia University - Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science

Jie Shen

University of California, Irvine - Department of Statistics

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: June 2008

Abstract

Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is Storable Votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15–30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85–95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive.

Suggested Citation

Casella, Alessandra and Ehrenberg, Shuky and Gelman, Andrew and Shen, Jie, Protecting Minorities in Binary Elections: A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data (June 2008). NBER Working Paper No. w14103, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1149349

Alessandra Casella (Contact Author)

Columbia University - Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Economics ( email )

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Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

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National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

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Shuky Ehrenberg

Yale University - Law School ( email )

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Columbia University - Department of Economics

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Andrew Gelman

Columbia University - Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science ( email )

New York, NY 10027
United States
212-854-4883 (Phone)
212-663-2454 (Fax)

Jie Shen

University of California, Irvine - Department of Statistics ( email )

Campus Drive
Irvine, CA California 62697-3125
United States

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