Mathematics and democracy. Recent advances in voting systems and collective choice. Including papers from the International Workshop on Mathematics and Democracy: Voting Systems and Collective Choice, held in Erice, September 18--23, 2005. (Q2507990)

Contents: Fuad Aleskerov, Power indices taking into account agents' preferences (1--18); Nicola Apollonio, Ronald I. Becker, Isabella Lari, Federica Ricca and Bruno Simeone, The sunfish against the octopus: opposing compactness to gerrymandering (19--41); Michel Balinski, Apportionment: uni- and bi-dimensional (43--53); Paul H. Edelman, Minimum total deviation apportionments (55--64); Vito Fragnelli and Guido Ortona, Comparison of electoral systems: simulative and game theoretic approaches (65--81); D. Marc Kilgour, Steven J. Brams and M. Remzi Sanver, How to elect a representative committee using approval balloting (83--95); Christian Klamler, On some distance aspects in social choice theory (97--104); Sebastian Maier, Algorithms for biproportional apportionment (105--116); Tommi Meskanen and Hannu Nurmi, Distance from consensus: a theme and variations (117--132); Jack H. Nagel, A strategic problem in approval voting (133--150); Aline Pennisi, The Italian bug: a flawed procedure for bi-proportional seat allocation (151--165); Friedrich Pukelsheim, Current issues of apportionment methods (167--176); Friedrich Pukelsheim and Sebastian Maier, A gentle majority clause for the apportionment of committee seats (177--188); Victoriano Ramírez, Allotment according to preferential vote: Ecuador's elections (189--204); Victoriano Ramírez, Antonio Palomares and Maria L. Márquez, Degressively proportional methods for the allotment of the European parliament seats amongst the EU member states (205--220); Donald G. Saari, Hidden mathematical structures of voting (221--234); Petur Zachariassen and Martin Zachariassen, A comparison of electoral formulae for the Faroese parliament (235--251). Mathematics and Democracy presents a collection of research papers focusing on quantitative aspects of electoral system theory, such as game-theoretic, decision-theoretic, statistical, probabilistic, combinatorial, geometric, and optimization-based approaches. Electronic voting protocols and other security issues have also recently been devoted a great deal of attention. Quantitative analyses provide a powerful tool to detect inconsistencies or poor performance in actual systems. The topics cover the forefront of research in this field: Proportional methods, Biproportional apportionment, Approval voting, Gerrymanderin, Metric approaches to Social Choice, Impossibility theorems, Applications to concrete cases such as the procedures used to elect the EU Parliament, the US Congress, and various national and regional assemblies are discussed, as well as issues related to committee voting. The present book grew out of the International Workshop on Mathematics and Democracy: Voting Systems and Collective Choice, which took place 18-23 September 2005 at the Ettore Majorana Centre. A set of new power indices is introduced extending Banzhaf power index and taking into account agents' preferences to coalesce. An axiomatic characterization of intensity functions representing a desire of agents to coalesce is given. A set of axioms for new power indices is presented and discussed. An example of use of these indices for Russian parliament is given in article of F. Aleskerov. Gerrymandering - the artful and partisan manipulation of electoral districts - is a well known pathology of electoral systems, especially majoritarian ones. In this paper the authors try to give theoretical and experimental answers to the following questions: 1) How much biased can the assignment of seats be under the effect of gerrymandering? 2) How effective is compactness as a remedy against gerrymandering? A highly stylized combinatorial model of gerrymandering is studied and a more realistic multiobjective graph-partitioning model is adopted and local search techniques are exploited in order to find satisfactory district designs (Nicola Apollonio et al.). The paper of M. Balinski characterizes divisor methods for vector and matrix apportion problems with very simple properties. For the vector problem -- a vector gives the votes of parties or the populations of states, a single number the size of the house -- they are shown to be the only methods that are coherent with the definition of the corresponding divisor method when applied to only two states or parties. For the matrix problem -- rows correspond to districts, columns to parties, entries to votes for party -- lists, and the number of seats due to each row (or district) and each column (or party) is known -- one extra property is necessary. The method must be proportional: it must give identical answers to a problem obtained by re-scaling any rows and/or any columns of the matrix of vote. Simulation may be a useful tool to address some basic problems concerning the choice of the electoral system. A case study is analyzed as an example. The utility of including power indices is discussed. A simulation program is illustrated in the paper by Vito Fragnelli and Guido Ortona. P. Edelman presents an algorithm for computing the minimum total deviation apportionment. Some properties of this apportionment are also explored. This particular apportionment arises from the jurisprudential concern that total deviation is the appropriate measure for the harm caused by malapportionment of the United States House of Representatives. Social choice theory deals with aggreating individual opinions into social choices. Over the past decades a large number of choice methods have been evaluated in terms of various criteria of performance. The authors focus on methods that can be viewed as distance minimizing ones in the sense that they can be analyzed in terms of a goal state of consensus and the methods themselves can be seen as minimizing the distance of the observed profile from that consensus. The methods, thus, provide a way of measuring the degree of disagreement prevailing in the profile (Tommi Meskanen, Hannu Nurmi). Three apportionment problems are addressed that are of current interest in Germany and Switzerland: the assignment of committee seats in a way that preserves the parliamentary majority-minority relation, the introduction of minimum restrictions in a two-ballot system to accomodate the direct seats won by the constituency ballots, and biproportional apportionment methods for systems with multiple districts so as to achieve proportionality between party votes as well as between district population (Friedrich Pukelsheim). In the paper of Ramírez results are shown for some unipersonal and pluripersonal elections in Ecuador and in Spain, observing that the used methods can be replaced by better ones. A method for individual elections is presented that is based on one-to-one comparisons, and preferential voting. This method verifies Condorcet and Pareto, and it is also better than the Two Round method. For multicandidate elections proportional and monotone methods based on preferential vote are given.