TY - JOUR AU - Casella,Alessandra AU - Ehrenberg,Shuky AU - Gelman,Andrew AU - Shen,Jie TI - Protecting Minorities in Binary Elections: A Test of Storable Votes Using Field Data JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14103 PY - 2008 Y2 - June 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14103 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14103.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Alessandra Casella Department of Economics Columbia University 420 West 118 Street New York, NY 10027 Tel: 212/854-2459 Fax: 212/854-8059 E-Mail: ac186@columbia.edu Shuky Ehrenberg Yale Law School PO Box 208215 New Haven, CT 0652 E-Mail: shuky.ehrenberg@yale.edu Andrew Gelman Department of Statistics and Department of Political Science Columbia University New York, NY 10027 E-Mail: gelman@stat.columbia.edu Jie Shen Department of Statistics University of California Irvine E-Mail: jshen3@uci.edu AB - Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is Storable Votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15--30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85--95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive. ER -