We introduce ‘Balanced Voting’, a voting scheme tailored to fundamental societal decisions. It works as follows: Citizens may abstain from voting on a fundamental direction in a first stage. This guarantees the voting right in a second voting stage on the variants of the fundamental direction chosen in the first. All ‘losers’ from the first stage also obtain voting rights in the second stage, while ‘winners’ do not. We develop a model with two fundamental directions and variants of these directions. Information about the preferences is private. We identify circumstances under which Balanced Voting performs well with regard to utilitarian welfare and Pareto dominance. We discuss the robustness of the results, procedural rules to implement the voting scheme, and extensions. Moreover, we provide several examples for which the scheme might be applied.

我们引入了“平衡投票”，这是一种针对基本社会决策量身定制的投票方案。它的工作原理如下：公民可以在第一阶段放弃对基本方向的投票。这保证了在第二个投票阶段对第一个选择的基本方向的变体的投票权。第一阶段的所有“输家”也获得第二阶段的投票权，而“赢家”则没有。我们开发了一个具有两个基本方向和这些方向的变体的模型。有关首选项的信息是私密的。我们确定了平衡投票在功利主义福利和帕累托优势方面表现良好的情况。我们讨论了结果的稳健性、实施投票方案的程序规则和扩展。此外，我们提供了几个可能应用该方案的示例。