Computer simulations of voting systems

Abstract

All voting procedures are susceptible to give rise, if not to paradoxes, at least to violations of some democratic principles. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the propensity of various voting rules -belonging to the class of scoring rules- to satisfy two versions of the majority principle. We consider the asymptotic case where the numbers of voters tends to infinity and, for each rule, we study with the help of Monte Carlo methods how this propensity varies as a function of the number of candidates.