This paper illustrates ALEX4.1, the 2007 version of the program of simulation of electoral systems developed at ALEX, the Laboratory for Experimental and Simulative Economics of the Università del Piemonte Orientale at Alessandria, Italy. The main features of the program have been...

The paper describes a simulation program for comparing electoral systems. The user fixes some basic features, like the distribution of first preferences, their peakedness, the dimension of the districts, and so on. The program produces the resulting Parliament under a number of electoral system,...

The paper describes a weighted-voting system for the election of a Parliament. The system is easy to implement, and it dominates plurality, where "dominates" means that it performs better with reference to both representativeness and stability. The system has some other nice properties,namely...

What do indices of disproportionality actually measure? They provide an aggregate estimation of the difference between votes cast and seats assignment, but the relation between the value of the indices and the will of the voters is highly questionable. The reason is that when casting the vote...

The choice of the electoral system should be delegated to the citizens. However, citizens are not sufficiently informed to choose the system directly. It is argued that they may instead state their preferences for two basic characteristics of a Parliament, i.e. Governability and...

Commonsense wisdom claims that majoritarian parliaments produce more efficient governments than proportional ones, because there are less decisors involved. Empirical evidence gives poor support to this claim. A possible explanation is that the real decisors may be not the parties, but the...

It is suggested that it is possible to enhance employment through a large reduction of the cost of newly hired workers, with no changes in net wage. If the unemployment is high, this policy is almost surely efficient, but for minor caveats. 400 italian entrepreneurs where asked to assess the...

The paper presents the results of some simulations of the effect of the invasion of non-cooperating subjects into a community adopting a cooperative convention. The convention is described by an indefinitely repeated prisoner-dilemma game. We check the effects on the robustness of the...

The issue of power plays a relevant role in evaluating the representativeness of a Parliament. In this paper a new governability index is introduced, taking inspiration from the propensity to disruption and referring to the power of the parties.