This paper reviews the arguments that justify the principles of proportional and degressively proportional representation.

Within the framework of pure redistribution (dividing one unit of a homogeneous good among identical individuals), the paper analyses the redistributions that arise from Downsian two-party electoral competition. It appears that the strategic behavior of vote-maximizing parties lead them to...

We consider a committee facing a binary decision under uncertainty. Each member holds some private information. Members may have different preferences and initial beliefs, but they all agree which decision should be taken in each of the two states of the world. We characterize the optimal...

This paper presents a large-scale experiment on the Approval Voting rule that took place during the 2002 French presidential election. We describe the experiment and its main results. The findings are as follows: (i) Such an experiment is feasible, and very well accepted by voters. (ii) The...