"Bracket Voting: Structuring 'Final Four' Elections like Familiar Sports Tournaments"

I’ve posted this new article on SSRN. Here’s the abstract:

This essay, a contribution to the Ohio State Law Journal symposium on the important new book Aligning Election Law by Nicholas Stephanopoulos, addresses the value of the alignment principle for evaluating alternative electoral systems. It discusses the challenge that social choice theory—in particular, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem—poses for the alignment principle as the guiding metric for judging electoral systems. It offers an alternative way to decide what electoral system a democracy should adopt, a way that accepts the path-dependency of electoral processes and is rooted in the idea that a constitution can choose an appropriately path-dependent electoral procedure based on constitutional values. The essay uses a distin