Qualitative Voting∗

As opposed to the classical voting system (one person one decision one vote) a new voting system is deÞned where agents are endowed with a given number of votes that can be distributed freely between a prearranged number of issues that have to be approved or dismissed. Its essence relies on allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences in a simple and applicable manner. From a mechanism design perspective we Þrst prove which allocations are implementable: for a social choice function to be implementable it should only care about the voter relative intensities between the issues at the interim stage. We also prove that this new voting system, Qualitative Voting, Pareto dominates Majority Rule in some general settings and, even more, it achieves the only ex-ante incentive compatible optimal allocation. Finally, an argument in favour of Majority Rule is presented showing that the optimal implementable allocation robust to any possible prior is the one achieved by Majority Rule. JEL ClassiÞcation: C72, D70, P16