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There is a new proposal in area 51 about voting systems : http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/97790/voting-systems.

Are questions on voting systems welcome here? Under which conditions?

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3 Answers 3

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The obvious answer is "questions about the economics of voting systems are on topic here". That's a bit vague, but I guess as a minimum it would include

  • questions about the incentives created by different voting schemes and the relationship between the rules of the scheme and individual voting behaviour;
  • questions about the distributional properties of voting schemes and the way in which they aggregate individual preferences into a social decision;
  • more generally, questions about formally modelling voting schemes and voting behaviour;

Some things that should be off-topic would be

  • empirical questions with no obvious economic content;
  • practical questions about voting schemes in use around the world, individuals' voting rights in particular jurisdictions, etc.
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As Ubiquitious said, it's a bit difficult to say what kind of questions pop up.

It's related to political economics, but also to Political Science(@SE).

At the moment, all of the 8 example questions (negatively and positively voted) would be on-topic here. Perhaps as the number of example questions grows, we can find a border case that wouldn't be on-topic here anymore.

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I would think that at the bare minimum all questions that would be on-topic in an economics journal should be considered on topic.

There are plenty of economics journals who publish papers from the theory of voting systems (Soc Choice and Welfare especially but also pretty much every theory journal). Thus, I would consider all questions from voting theory to be on-topic. Empirical papers on voting systems are harder to find in the economics literature but some exceptions exist.

Thus, unless there are other reasons which disqualify a question, I would assume questions on voting systems are on-topic.

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