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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Realities Of Electoral Reform, Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Eric M. Mcghee, Steven Rogers
The Realities Of Electoral Reform, Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Eric M. Mcghee, Steven Rogers
Vanderbilt Law Review
What good are theories if they cannot be tested? Election law has wrestled with this question over the last generation. Two new theories have emerged during this period that reject conventional rights-and-interests balancing. In its place, the responsiveness theory asserts that legislators' positions should be sensitive to changes in the views of their constituents. Similarly, the alignment theory claims that voters' and legislators'preferences should be congruent. Unfortunately, both of these theories share a common flaw: They provide no way for anyone to tell whether electoral policies improve or worsen responsiveness or alignment. They operate at too normative a level to …
Voting Squared: Quadratic Voting In Democratic Politics, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl
Voting Squared: Quadratic Voting In Democratic Politics, Eric A. Posner, E. Glen Weyl
Vanderbilt Law Review
Conventional democratic institutions aggregate preferences poorly. The norm of one-person-one-vote with majority rule treats people fairly by giving everyone an equal chance to influence outcomes but fails to give proportional weight to people whose interests in a social outcome are stronger than those of other people. This problem leads to the familiar phenomenon of tyranny of the majority. Various institutions that have been tried or proposed over the years to correct this problem-including supermajority rule, weighted voting, cumulative voting, "mixed constitutions," executive discretion, and judicially protected rights-all badly misfire in various ways, for example, by creating gridlock or corruption. This …