Accidental politicians: How randomly selected legislators can improve parliament efficiency

Alessandro Pluchino, Cesare Garofalo, Andrea Rapisarda, Salvatore Spagano and Maurizio Caserta

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2011, vol. 390, issue 21, 3944-3954

Abstract: We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an “efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

Keywords: Sociophysics; Complex systems; Agent based models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:390:y:2011:i:21:p:3944-3954

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2011.06.028

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