Title. Weighted representative democracy

Abstract. I will discuss a new system of democratic representation. In this system, any voter can choose any legislator as her representative; thus, different legislators can represent different numbers of voters. Decisions in the legislature are made by weighted majority voting, where the weight of each legislator is determined by the number of voters she represents. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss some joint work with Arnold Soh, in which we show that, if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions obtained in the legislature will agree with those which would have been reached by a popular referendum decided by simple majority vote. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss my more recent work on endogenous candidacy in this model (this is work in progress).