O n the D emocratic W eights of N ations

Which voting weights ought to be allocated to single delegates of differently sized groups from a democratic fairness perspective? We operationalize the ‘one person, one vote’ principle by demanding every individual’s influence on collective decisions to be equal a priori. The analysis concerns intervals of alternatives. Weights should be proportional to the square root of constituency sizes if preferences are drawn independently from the same distribution for all agents. A Shapley value-based variation of simple proportionality to size becomes optimal if voters are polarized along constituency lines.

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