PPE Speaker Series: “What Voting Power Cannot Be” with Daniel Wodak (University of Pennsylvania)

Abstract:
In Sovereign Virtue, Ronald Dworkin wrote “Almost everyone assumes that democracy means equal voting power”. If anything like that is true, much hangs on how we understand voting power. The standard account is that your voting power is the probability that your vote changes the outcome given that each possible combination of votes is equally probable. This account has dramatic implications. Most famously, it implies that the US Electoral College and EU Council of Ministers are significantly biased in favor of large states. But the standard account of voting power cannot be true. As an “a priori” account, it is known to rest on the principle of indifference. But as such, it faces the familiar problem of multiple partitions. We could give an equal probability to each possible combination of votes (I vote Red, you vote Blue…) or to each possible vote share (Red wins all votes, Red wins all votes but one…). This problem generates a dilemma: either any a priori account of voting power is arbitrary, or the only non-arbitrary account of voting power systematically departs from the standard view, and generates very different practical implications for systems like the Electoral College.

Please join us for this free lecture, open to the public, with Q&A to follow. Pizza will be provided after the event!

Speaker Bio:
Daniel Wodak is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He also has a secondary appointment from the Penn Law School, and is an Associate Director of Penn’s Institute for Law and Philosophy.

Wodak finished his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton in 2016. From 2016 to 2019 he was an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Virginia Tech.

Daniel works broadly in moral, legal, social and political philosophy. He won the Marc Sanders Prize for Political Philosophy in 2023, and the Marc Sanders Prize for Metaethics in 2019.