Henry Richmond Droop
Encyclopedia
Henry Richmond Droop* was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

. He is widely credited with devising the Droop quota
Droop Quota
The Droop quota is the quota most commonly used in elections held under the Single Transferable Vote system. It is also sometimes used in elections held under the largest remainder method of party-list proportional representation . In an STV election the quota is the minimum number of votes a...

 that is used today in the common voting system known as the Single Transferable Vote
Single transferable vote
The single transferable vote is a voting system designed to achieve proportional representation through preferential voting. Under STV, an elector's vote is initially allocated to his or her most preferred candidate, and then, after candidates have been either elected or eliminated, any surplus or...

. He also may have been the first to write down what later became known as Duverger's Law
Duverger's law
In political science, Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that a plurality rule election system tends to favor a two-party system. This is one of two hypotheses proposed by Duverger, the second stating that “the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to...

, in 1869.

He married Clara Baily (ca. 1841 - September 7 1921) on 17 August 1872* and was the father of John Percival Droop
John Percival Droop
John Percival Droop was a British classical archaeologist. He served as the professor of classical archaeology at the University of Liverpool from 1921 to 1948...

 (1882 - 1963), the archaeologist.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK