ABSTRACT

This chapter refines a particular question of political justice by means of a mathematical analysis and thus to demonstrate the utility of such inquiry for political philosophy. It emphasizes that for a system that includes well-disciplined and long-lasting political parties, the foregoing discussion is inadequate. In the French National Assembly in 1953-54, among approximately sixty distributions of weights of parties for which the indices were calculated, four showed that the smallest parties had power ratios of less than 0.80, and in one instance the ratio was less than 0.60. Such exceptions aside, it is safe to assume that the bias given by difference of the weights of the members is not very great so long as one considers only the weights and powers of the members. The reason for advocating weighted voting has been that the advocate wishes to save the seats of representatives from small districts which are likely to be consolidated under reapportionment into districts of equal size.