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Voting Structures and the Square Root Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Geoff Fielding  and
Hans Liebeck
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Extract

This Note is concerned with the problem of how to distribute votes in an assembly so that all interested groups are ‘fairly’ represented. It is clear that in many cases present arrangements are open to criticism. For example, in the United Nations General Assembly both China (population 732 million) and Norway (4 million) are represented by one vote. The situation at the British Labour Party annual conference is in direct contrast to this. Here votes are allocated to the individual unions and constituency Labour parties in proportion to their membership (rounded up to the nearest thousand), so that the Transport and General Workers' Union (membership 1,000,000) exercises 1,000 votes, whereas the 25,000 members of the National Union of Seamen are represented by only twenty-five votes. Since the total number of votes at the conference is about 6,000, it might be felt that the large unions exercise a disproportionate amount of influence.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , April 1975 , pp. 249 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 All figures relating to the Labour Party annual conference are taken from the List of Affiliated Organizations attending the 1972 Blackpool Conference.

2 Penrose, L. S., ‘The Elementary Statistics of Majority Voting’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, CIX (1946), 53–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Penrose, L. S., On the Objective Study of Crowd Behaviour (London: H. K. Lewis, 1952), Chap. II and Appendix.Google Scholar

3 Penrose, , ‘The Elementary Statistics of Majority Voting’, p. 54.Google Scholar

4 Penrose, , On the Objective Study of Crowd Behaviour, p.7.Google Scholar

5 Figures from Whitaker's Almanac (1974).