2018/01/13 by Ellen Veomett, Veomett, Ellen
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #91F99 #97A40 #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Fiscal Policy and Economic Growth #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1801.05301
openalex publication_date 2018/01/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recently, scholars from law and political science have introduced metrics which use only election outcomes (and not district geometry) to assess the presence of partisan gerrymandering. The most high-profile example of such a tool is the efficiency gap. Some scholars have suggested that such tools should be sensitive enough to alert us when two election outcomes have the same percentage of votes going to political party A, but one of the two awards party A more seats. When a metric is able to distinguish election outcomes in this way, that metric is said to satisfy the efficiency principle. In this article, we show that the efficiency gap fails to satisfy the efficiency principle. We show precisely how the efficiency principle breaks down in the presence of unequal voter turnout. To do this, we first present a construction that, given any rationals 1/4< V<3/4 and 0