Evaluating departures from fair representation

Computer–intensive estimates are introduced to evaluate departures from proportionality between the numbers of electors in a partition of a voting population and the numbers of representatives in the corresponding partition of the elected representation. At the first stage a pair of indices is proposed, one to evaluate the total strength of the departures and the other to indicate to what extent they are due to over–representation increasing (or decreasing) with the number of electors in a group. The properties of the indices are examined in suitably defined stochastic models which describe this type of over–representation. Since the values of the indices are strongly influenced by the distribution of electors in the given partition, a second stage of estimation is performed in order to get some partition–free] information on the existence of a monotone size representation, and, if it exists, on its strength. The relevant transformation is based on intensive computer simulation in the introduced models. The methods proposed are applied to the results of the 1991 election of the Polish Scientific Research Council, which distributes funds among universities, scientific institutions and individual groups of researchers.