Suchergebnisse

When collective choices are made in more than one round and with different groups of decision makers, so‐called 'election inversions' may take place, where each round produces different majority outcomes. In this article, two versions of such compound majority paradoxes are identified that are particularly, but not exclusively, relevant for systems of proportional representation with governing coalitions: the 'Threshold Paradox' and the 'Federal Paradox'. The empirical relevance of the paradoxes is illustrated with examples from two Danish elections (in 1971 and in 1990), where a majority of the voters voted for one bloc of parties, but a majority of the seats fell to another.

Voter preferences for eight general elections for the Danish parliament are analysed using survey data to investigate the possible presence of five types of social choice paradoxes that may occur in list systems of proportional representation. Two serious paradoxes fail to manifest themselves, while three others occur with different frequencies. One paradox always occurs – namely, for the social ordering of political parties based on pair‐wise comparisons to be significantly different from that of the allocation of seats according to a principle of proportional representation. This result challenges the common view that a party receiving more seats than another must be presumed to be the one preferred by a majority.