Solid coalition

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In social choice theory, a solid coalition is a group of voters who support a given group of candidates over any opponent outside the group. Solid coalitions formalize the idea of a political faction, allowing social choice theorists to study the behavior of electoral systems in the presence of ideological divisions without explicit reference to organized political parties. This definition is useful even in the absence of party labels, or when labels do not accurately reflect ideological divisions in the electorate (as in the cleavages between Northern and Southern Democrats in the 20th century).

Definition

A voter is part of the solid coalition for a group of candidates if they rank every member inside the group higher than every member outside the group. In other words, their least-preferred candidate inside the coalition must be ranked higher than their most-preferred candidate outside the coalition.

Example

Consider the following example, taken from American politics of the 1800s:

In this election, the Whig faction creates a solid coalition with 55% of the vote, because 55% of voters rank both Clay and Webster over both van Buren and Jackson. Similarly, the remaining 45% of voters form a Democratic coalition.

However, note that unlike formal political parties, solid coalitions can overlap with each other. For example, the solid coalition consisting only of Jackson has support from 25% of voters (the voters ranking him first).

Applications

Majority for solid coalitions

The mutual majority criterion (also called majority for solid coalitions) states that if a solid coalition includes >50% of all voters, a candidate from that coalition should win.

Descending Coalitions

Proportional representation

One important use of solid coalitions is in defining proportional representation systems that do not rely on party labels. A voting system is proportional for solid coalitions (PSC) if it always elects a number of candidates from each solid coalition that is proportional to its size. For instance, if there are 100 voters and 10 seats, and a solid coalition of 20 voters supports candidates A, B, and C, then a PSC voting system should elect at least 2 candidates from {A, B, C}.

Cooperative game theory

Solid coalitions can be used to model coalition formation in cooperative game theory, where individuals can communicate and behave strategically in their group's interests.^[1]

References