Weighted representative democracy
Abstract
âWe propose a new system of democratic representation. Any voter can choose any legislator as her representative; thus, different legislators can represent different numbers of voters. Decisions in the legislature are made by weighted majority voting, where the weight of each legislator is determined by the number of voters she represents. We show that, if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions obtained in the legislature agree with those which would have been reached by a popular referendum decided by simple majority vote.â
Introduction
Both regional and representative democracies suffer from problems relating to proper representation (and feelings of representation). Some systems use weighted voting based on representation amount and regionality (similar to the house of representatives) (research on voting weights has been done here Barberà and Jackson (2006), Koriyama et al. (2013) and Mac´e and Treibich (2018))
Proposal
Votes are made for a representative, not a party. Representatives who donât pass the lowest barrier are âtossed outâ and people who voted for them get to vote again for someone who received enough votes to contend.
The end result is a parliament of X representatives, each of which represents a sub segment of the population to some proportion. All voters have someone theyâve voted for to represent them.
Questions
- This doesnât seem to address different issues, and assumes one representative is always the same value to a voter
- Parties band together so as to enable stronger coalitions, but this seems to not be addressed enough.