Method of equal shares
| A joint Politics and Economics series |
| Social choice and electoral systems |
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The method of equal shares (MES) is a participatory budgeting algorithm specifically designed to guarantee extended justified representation (a form of proportional representation). It was originally developed for committee elections (under the name Rule X). It was later adapted to participatory budgeting (PB) and to simultaneous public decisions. It can be used with any available ballot format, including approval ballots, ranked ballots or cardinal ballots. MES has been used for participatory budgeting in various European cities.
MES can be described as a member of a class of voting methods called expanding approvals rules introduced earlier in 2019 by Aziz and Lee for ordinal preferences (that include approval ballots).