Seat bias

Seat bias is a property describing methods of apportionment. These are methods used to allocate seats in a parliament among federal states or among political parties. A method is biased if it systematically favors small parties over large parties, or vice versa. There are several mathematical measures of bias, which can disagree slightly, but all measures broadly agree that rules based on Droop's quota or Jefferson's method are strongly biased in favor of large parties, while rules based on Webster's method, Hill's method, or Hare's quota have low levels of bias,[1] with the differences being sufficiently small that different definitions of bias produce different results.[2]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Ernst, Lawrence R. (1994). "Apportionment Methods for the House of Representatives and the Court Challenges". Management Science. 40 (10): 1207–1227. ISSN 0025-1909.