These papers should be considered drafts. Comments are welcome.
You may also be interested in my dissertation or published papers
Legislative intent and effect are intimately intertwined in redistricting lawsuits and academic research. Yet intent is impossible to measure directly and legislative statements of intent are often absent, ambiguous, or misleading. Academics and expert witnesses have offered a number of empirical approaches, such as searching for 'divergent boundary segments', attempting to create 'random' comparison plans and using estimated 'bias' and responsiveness to infer intent. In this article, we show that most of the methods currently in use are statistically biased, and the remainder fail to capture predominant intent.
Current voting jurisprudence and electoral institutions take into consideration only preferences over candidates, but neglect deeper preferences over assemblies. In "Social Choice in a Representative Democracy", Benoit and Kornhauser (1994) argue that "preferences over assemblies not candidates are fundamental" thus all election methods that are based on preferences for candidates are suspect, and they give powerful illustrations of the pitfalls of candidate-based voting procedures.
In this research note, I use complexity analysis and computer simulations to compare a number of assembly-based voting systems to their candidate-based counterparts. I find that assembly-based voting systems have serious limitations: Assembly-based voting systems that require full-preference orderings are computationally costly, hence impractical for elections in which candidates significantly outnumber seats. On the other hand, assembly-based systems that require only partial preference orderings can produce worse results than their candidate-based counterparts because assembly-based systems can multiply the number of possible choices in an election and exacerbate the voters' collective coordination problem
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