Why does voting get so complicated? A review of theories for analyzing democratic participation
Open Access
- 1 November 2002
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Institute of Mathematical Statistics in Statistical Science
- Vol. 17 (4), 383-404
- https://doi.org/10.1214/ss/1049993199
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to present a sample from the panoply of formal theories on voting and elections to Statistical Science readers who have had limited exposure to such work. These abstract ideas provide a framework for understanding the context of the empirical articles that follow in this volume. The primary focus of this theoretical literature is on the use of mathematical formalism to describe electoral systems and outcomes by modeling both voting rules and human behavior. As with empirical models, these constructs are never perfect descriptors of reality, but instead form the basis for understanding fundamental characteristics of the studied system. Our focus is on providing a general, but not overly simplified, review of these theories with practical examples. We end the article with a thought experiment that applies different vote aggregation schemes to the 2000 presidential election count in Florida, and we find that alternative methods provide different results.This publication has 47 references indexed in Scilit:
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