Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Llull's writings on electoral systems

2001; Volume: 41; Issue: 97 Linguagem: Inglês

2340-4752

Gunter Hägele, Friedrich Pukelsheim,

Political Theory and Democracy

We present three writings of Ramon Llull on electoral systems: Artifitium electionis personarum (before 1283), Chapter 24 En qual manera Natana fo eleta a abadessa from the novel Blaquerna (about 1283), and De arte eleccionis (1299). The tract Artifitium electionis personarum, edited here for the first time, proves to be an independent work shedding new light on the two later sources. In all three cases the electoral system is based exclusively on pairwise comparisons between two candidates at a time. The first two texts describe exhaustive schemes: the candidate winning most of the pairwise comparisons is the overall winner. The last text proposes a system of successive eliminations: the winner of the last comparison also wins the election.