ABSTRACT

While a game-theoretic school of political science has existed since Riker’s innovation of the 1950s (see Riker 1992), nineteenth-century English writers on methods of election employed arguments which indicated a recognition of the strategic interdependence of voters-and, even more so, parties. Spurred by parliamentary reforms of suffrage and such abuses as rotten boroughs and redistricting, they contemplated substantial changes in geographic representation, seats per district, votes per elector and criteria for winning. The most interesting of this literature is that written by proponents of various forms of proportional representation (PR).