Published April 2006
| public
Journal Article
Open
On the Weights of Nations: Assigning Voting Weights in a Heterogeneous Union
- Creators
- Barberà, Salvador
- Jackson, Matthew O.
Abstract
We study indirect democracy in which countries, states, or districts each elect a representative who later votes at a union level on their behalf. We show that the voting rule that maximizes the total expected utility of all agents in the union involves assigning a weight to each district's vote and then sticking with the status quo unless at least a threshold of weighted votes is cast for change. We analyze how the weights relate to the population size of a country and the correlation structure of agents' preferences, and then we compare the voting weights in the Council of the European Union under the Nice Treaty and the recently proposed Constitution.
Additional Information
© 2006 by The University of Chicago. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and the National Science Foundation under grants SES-9986190 and SES-0316493, as well as financial support from the Centre de Referència d'Economia Analítica (Barcelona), the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through grant BEC2002-002130, and the Generalitat of Catalonia through grant SGR2001-00162. We thank Claus Beisbart, Ken Binmore, Jon Eguia, Annick Laruelle, Giovanni Maggi, Vincent Merlin, and Federico Valenciano for helpful discussions and comments, and Robert Shimer and two referees for suggestions on earlier drafts. We are also very grateful to Danilo Coelho for research assistance.Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 3970
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:BARjpe06
- Created
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2006-07-20Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2019-10-02Created from EPrint's last_modified field