Empowering Representative Voters: A Rationale and a Model for the Practice of Weighting Votes

Abstract

In practice, votes cast in parliamentary and related elections receive more weight as they are more representative. That practice is difficult to rationalize either from a juridical constitutional-democratic, or an economist preferential-choice point of view. On an applied-psychometric basis, the author presents a rationale by which voters are conceived as evaluators of political parties’ programs, candidates, and past performance. That conception leads to a general weighting model, of which both strict proportionality (unit weighting) and strict plurality (dichotomous weighting) appear to be special cases. The model appears to develop its full potential in a combination with an otherwise impractical dual ballot structure, by which voters can indicate a desired coalition partner, as illustrated by a fictive example. Reservations with respect to the model and its rationale are discussed.