Selecting Committees

Abstract

In selecting a committee, voters are often concerned with the over all composition of the committee rather than simply selecting a single individual as their representative. We give two examples of elections at Wheaton College in Massachusetts that illustrate the complexity of preferences that voters may have for the relationships among the individual candidates. These preferences cannot be separated into preferences on the individual candidates and are not detectable from only a voter's top-ranked committee. We outline the questions this raises for the design of committee elections in general and propose directions for future work.

A minimax procedure for electing committees

“…In addition to these questions, other procedures, especially those that allow for proportional representation (Potthoff and Brams 1998;Brams and Fishburn 2002;Ratliff, 2003Ratliff, , 2006, should be considered. Just as approval voting in single-winner elections stimulated considerable theoretical and empirical research beginning a generation ago (Brams and Fishburn 1978, 1983, 2005Weber 1995;Brams and Sanver 2006), we hope that the minimax procedure generates new research on using approval balloting to elect committees under the minimax procedure.…”

The Mathematics of Referendum Elections and Separable Preferences

“…For the reader who is interested in exploring this topic in more detail, there are plenty of other interesting results that we have not mentioned here (for instance, [14,20]). Furthermore, separable preferences are important to many other areas and applications, including fair division [8,23], committee selection [25,26], game theory [1, 2, 5, 22], artificial intelligence [18,19,28], and conflict resolution [24]. With regard to the latter, Pruitt and Kim [24] note that "demands, goals, aspirations, and values often come in bundles-that is, they are psychologically linked" (p. 208), and that, unless these linkages are broken, the most integrative solutions to a conflict situation may remain unexplored.…”

Electoral Systems

“…It is usual to study voting systems by identifying and comparing their properties Brams and Fishburn 2002), an approach followed in Ratliff (2003Ratliff ( , 2006 in the investigation of procedures for multi-winner elections that are not based on approval balloting. After a general introduction (Sect.…”