The Ostrogorski Paradox: A Peculiarity of Compound Majority Decision

Abstract

Abstract In the article it is shown that if during an election each voter picks the party with which he agrees on a majority of issues, it is nevertheless possible that a majority of voters disagrees with the winning majority party on every issue. This ‘inverted majority decision’, here called the Ostrogorski-paradox, resembles the structure underlying the Condorcet paradox and Simpson's paradox. Each concerns a relation of pairwise decision or observation functioning in an n -wise world. Our object here is to point out a possible paradox of parliamentary democracy, and to sketch some of its relationships to other paradoxes.