The Desired Political Entropy

Abstract

In an article published in the December 30, 1967 issue of the Dutch weekly magazine Vrij Nederland, Mr. Frans Grosfeld suggested the following modification of the procedure of parliamentary representation of political parties. Instead of the conventional method of allocating to each party a number of representatives proportional to the number of votes cast for the party, he proposed to allocate a number of representatives which is proportional to the square of the number of votes. Thus, when there are n parties and when p ₁ ,…, p _n are the proportions of the total number of votes obtained by these parties, the idea is to allocate a fraction q _i of the representatives to the ith party determined by

$$ {q_i} = p_i^2/\sum\limits_{{j = 1}}^n {p_j^2\;\;\;i = 1, \cdots, \;n} $$

(1.1)

This article first appeared in the American Political Science Review 63 (1969) 521–525. Reprinted with the permission of the American Political Science Association.