Mathematics and Democracy

• Power Indices Taking into Account Agents’ Preferences.- The Sunfish Against the Octopus: Opposing Compactness to Gerrymandering.- Apportionment: Uni- and Bi-Dimensional.- Minimum Total Deviation Apportionments.- Comparison of Electoral Systems: Simulative and Game Theoretic Approaches.- How to Elect a Representative Committee Using Approval Balloting.- On Some Distance Aspects in Social Choice Theory.- Algorithms for Biproportional Apportionment.- Distance from Consensus: A Theme and Variations.- A Strategic Problem in Approval Voting.- The Italian Bug: A Flawed Procedure for Bi-Proportional Seat Allocation.- Current Issues of Apportionment Methods.- A Gentle Majority Clause for the Apportionment of Committee Seats.- Allotment According to Preferential Vote: Ecuador’s Elections.- Degressively Proportional Methods for the Allotment of the European Parliament Seats Amongst the EU Member States.- Hidden Mathematical Structures of Voting.- A Comparison of Electoral Formulae for the Faroese Parliament.

From the reviews:"The … book is an edited volume, and exhibits both the flaws and virtues of that genre. … I found the book interesting and important. … the book is well worth having on your shelf. … It would be useful, in fact, as a classroom exercise for students in a variety of disciplines, because it both illustrates the unnatural power of mathematics to illuminate hard questions and unites several apparently unrelated problems in a single analytic rubric. … this is a valuable and important book." (Michael Munger, Public Choice, Vol. 132, 2007)"This is a fine collection of 17 papers chosen from contributions to the International Workshop on Mathematics and Democracy: Voting Systems and Collective Choice that took place in Erice, Sicily in 2005. … one will walk away from this volume with the sense that one has been exposed to the research frontier of the electoral system theory." (Ugur Ozdemir, Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 31, 2008)