Satisfaction Approval Voting

37 Pages Posted: 19 Jul 2010 Last revised: 30 Aug 2010

See all articles by Steven J. Brams

Steven J. Brams

New York University (NYU) - Wilf Family Department of Politics

D. Marc Kilgour

Wilfrid Laurier University - Department of Mathematics

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: 2010

Abstract

We propose a new voting system, satisfaction approval voting (SAV), for multiwinner elections, in which voters can approve of as many candidates or as many parties as they like. However, the winners are not those who receive the most votes, as under approval voting (AV), but those who maximize the sum of the satisfaction scores of all voters, where a voter’s satisfaction score is the fraction of his or her approved candidates who are elected. SAV may give a different outcome from AV - in fact, SAV and AV outcomes may be disjoint - but SAV generally chooses candidates representing more diverse interests than does AV (this is demonstrated empirically in the case of a recent election of the Game Theory Society). A decision-theoretic analysis shows that all strategies except approving of a least-preferred candidate are undominated, so voters will often find it optimal to approve of more than one candidate. In party-list systems, SAV apportions seats to parties according to the Jefferson/d’Hondt method with a quota constraint, which favors large parties and gives an incentive to smaller parties to coordinate their policies and forge alliances, even before an election, that reflect their supporters’ coalitional preferences.

Keywords: multiwinner election, voting, approval ballot, proportional representation, apportionment

JEL Classification: C70, D2, D7

Suggested Citation

Brams, Steven and Kilgour, D. Marc, Satisfaction Approval Voting (2010). APSA 2010 Annual Meeting Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1643177

Steven Brams (Contact Author)

New York University (NYU) - Wilf Family Department of Politics ( email )

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HOME PAGE: http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/stevenbrams.html

D. Marc Kilgour

Wilfrid Laurier University - Department of Mathematics ( email )

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