Optimal Voting Rules under Participation Constraints

Antonin Macé and Rafael Treibich
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Rafael Treibich: University of Southern Denmark

No 1742, AMSE Working Papers from Aix-Marseille School of Economics, France

Abstract: We study the design of voting rules for international unions when countries’ participation is voluntary. While efficiency recommends weighting countries proportionally to their stakes, we show that accounting for participation constraints entails overweighting some countries, those for which the incentive to participate is the lowest. When decisions are not enforceable, cooperation requires the satisfaction of more stringent constraints, that may be mitigated by granting a veto power to some countries. The model has important implications for the problem of apportionment, the allocation of voting weights to countries of differing populations, where it provides a rationale for setting a minimum representation for small countries.

Keywords: international unions; constitutional design; veto; participation constraints (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 C73 D02 F53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-gth, nep-mic and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aim:wpaimx:1742

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