Apportionment methods

Abstract

Apportionment methods are used to translate a set of positive natural numbers into a set of smaller natural numbers while keeping the proportions between the numbers very similar. The methods are used to allocate seats in a chamber proportionally to the number of votes for a party in an election or proportionally to regional populations. In this article, we describe six apportionment methods and the user-written egen function apport(), which implements these methods. © 2012 StataCorp LP.