Customer Reviews

Mathematics and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair-Division Procedures

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I enjoyed this book. Brams does provide mathematical proofs of his propositions in the chapter appendices, but overall, this is a fairly accessible and wide-ranging overview of Brams' current thinking on voting rules and fair-division procedures. One of the most interesting contributions of this book is the development of ranked approval voting systems, which combine many of the attractive features of Condorcet voting and simple approval voting. Brams also develops ways to implement proportional representation outside the party-list context, useful for professional societies, corporate boards, etc. seeking to elect multiple positions at once.

I highly recommend this book to lay readers seeking to learn about the state of the art in normative voting-rule theory. With any luck, it will advance the cause of reform of voting rules in single-winner, political elections.

This book continues Prof. Brams' partiality toward Approval Voting, a system he did not invent but of which he has been one of the strongest partisans. However, to his credit, he has actually admitted in this book that Approval Voting is not a panacea and there might be better ones "in certain circumstances." William Poundstone's book, "Gaming the Vote," actually discusses a system I prefer: Range Voting (also known as Score Voting). This being said, I generally think this to be a valuable new book: it discusses some modifications of Approval Voting that look like improvements, and analyzes some of the good and bad points of various voting systems. You should read it, but take Brams' well-known bias toward Approval Voting into account when reading.

This is neither a book on mathematics, nor a book for the generally interested reader: The mathematics it contains is very simple, yet incomplete. A math book on this level should certainly define Nash equilibria, to mention just one deficiency.
It is not a book for general reading, as it is simply too boring!

I have no idea, as to who might be the target audience of such a book.

This is a pity, as the subject is both interesting and important.

I read another book by Prof. Brams: Fair Division: from Cake Cutting to Dispute Resolution, which was far better, so I hope, this this was a one time mistake by Prof. Brams.