Protecting Minorities without Sacrificing Efficiency
The potential of Storable Votes is particularly clear in the presence of a systematic minority, a fixed group who consistently disagrees with the majority. The question of how to mitigate the tyranny of the majority and give weight not only to the rights, but to the preferences of the minority is the topic of this chapter. With Storable Votes, the minority can win occasionally by accumulating votes on issues that it deems most important. But because the majority typically can outvote it, the minority wins only if its strength of preference is high and the majority's strength of preference is low. The result is that the minority's preferences are represented, while aggregate efficiency either falls little or in fact rises, relative to simple majority voting. The theoretical predictions are again confirmed by a series of laboratory experiments: the frequency of minority victories, the relative payoff of the minority versus the majority, and the aggregate payoffs all match the theory.
Keywords: aggregate efficiency, minority preferences, majority voting, experiments
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