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  3. Journal of Economic Perspectives
  4. Winter 1995
  5. The Single Transferable Vote

Journal of Economic Perspectives

ISSN 0895-3309 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7965 (Online)

The Single Transferable Vote

  • Nicolaus Tideman
Journal of Economic Perspectives
vol. 9, no. 1, Winter 1995
(pp. 27–38)
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Abstract

The single transferable vote (STV) is a family of vote-counting procedures that use voters' rankings of candidates as input and achieve proportional representation. This paper compares STV with other types of voting procedures and discusses the history of STV, issues concerning the rules of STV, limitations of various versions of STV, and a new version of STV based on paired comparisons of sets of candidates. Each refinement of STV overcomes a limitation of previous versions but at some cost in either the difficulty of understanding the procedure, the cost of computing the outcome, or both.

Citation

Tideman, Nicolaus. 1995. "The Single Transferable Vote." Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (1): 27–38. DOI: 10.1257/jep.9.1.27

JEL Classification

  • D72 Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior