Preventing the Tyranny of the Majority - Experimental Evidence on the Choice of Voting Thresholds in Bayesian Games

Dirk Engelmann, Hans Peter Grüner, Timo Hoffmann and Alex Possajennikov ()

VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: In democracies, an absolute majority of the population may choose policies that are harmful to the rest of the population. A purpose of super-majority rules is to prevent this from happening. We study whether individuals optimally choose sub- or super-majority rules when the rights of minorities should be protected. Subjects propose more extreme voting rules for more skewed distributions, but we also find that rule choices are biased towards balanced rules, leading substantial welfare losses.

JEL-codes: C91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-des, nep-exp and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/168295/1/VfS-2017-pid-3621.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc17:168295

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2017 (Vienna): Alternative Structures for Money and Banking from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().