The Impossibility of a Gerrymander-Proof Representative Democracy

Abstract

A representative democracy is immune to gerrymandering if it satisfies Chambers' (2008) representative consistency. We examine preference aggregation and show that representative consistency is incompatible with three other normative desiderata --- weak Pareto, anonymity, and neutrality. We show this impossibility result both in a setting with ordinal preferences and in a setting with expected utility preferences.