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Selecting Committees

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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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, 02766

    Thomas C. Ratliff

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  1. Thomas C. Ratliff
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Correspondence to Thomas C. Ratliff.

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A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Analysis and Design of Electoral Systems Workshop at Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach, March 7–14, 2004. The author wishes to express his thanks to the participants for their many useful suggestions. He also wishes to express his thanks to Bernard Groffman for his interesting comments and for making the author aware of the paper by Chamerlin and Courant.

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Ratliff, T.C. Selecting Committees. Public Choice 126, 343–355 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-006-1747-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-006-1747-5

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