Mathematics and Democracy

In this book, different quantitative approaches to the study of electoral systems have been developed: game-theoretic, decision-theoretic, statistical, probabilistic, combinatorial, geometric, and optimization ones. All the authors are prominent scholars from these disciplines. Quantitative approaches offer a powerful tool to detect inconsistencies or poor performance in actual systems. Applications to concrete settings such as EU, American Congress, regional, and committee voting are discussed.

From the reviews:

"The ... book is an edited volume, and exhibits both the flaws and virtues of that genre. ... I found the book interesting and important. ... the book is well worth having on your shelf. ... It would be useful, in fact, as a classroom exercise for students in a variety of disciplines, because it both illustrates the unnatural power of mathematics to illuminate hard questions and unites several apparently unrelated problems in a single analytic rubric. ... this is a valuable and important book." (Michael Munger, Public Choice, Vol. 132, 2007)

"This is a fine collection of 17 papers chosen from contributions to the International Workshop on Mathematics and Democracy: Voting Systems and Collective Choice that took place in Erice, Sicily in 2005. ... one will walk away from this volume with the sense that one has been exposed to the research frontier of the electoral system theory." (Ugur Ozdemir, Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 31, 2008)