Where are the Best Parliamentary Election Methods?
Mark C. Wilson’s research focuses on combinatorial and algorithmic mathematics, voting
theory, and social networks. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from University
of Wisconsin-Madison. Wilson’s appointment at the University of Auckland is in the
Department of Computer Science and the Centre for Mathematical Social Sciences.
There are several apparently incompatible desiderata for the outcomes of parliamentary
elections, including representation and decisiveness. Some methods are clearly suboptimal
on both criteria, so it makes sense to explore the Pareto frontier of the space of
methods. An interesting issue not usually discussed in voting literature is that of
computational complexity - some methods on the frontier are computationally infeasible
to compute in practice. Carey and Hix analyzed methods used historically and isolated
the district magnitude as a key variable. Their solution works in practice, but does
it work in theory? Wilson will discuss an approach to this and similar electoral engineering
questions.
Please RSVP to Shani Brasier csd@uci.edu or 949.824.2904 as lunch will be provided.
Seating is limited.
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