Properties of Multiwinner Voting Rules

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to propose and study properties of multiwinner voting rules which can be consider as generalisations of single-winner scoring voting rules. We consider SNTV, Bloc, k-Borda, STV, and several variants of Chamberlin--Courant's and Monroe's rules and their approximations. We identify two broad natural classes of multiwinner score-based rules, and show that many of the existing rules can be captured by one or both of these approaches. We then formulate a number of desirable properties of multiwinner rules, and evaluate the rules we consider with respect to these properties.