Wisdom of the crowd? Information aggregation in representative democracy

Carlo Prato and Stephane Wolton

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The Condorcet Jury Theorem and subsequent literature establish the feasibility of information aggregation in a common-value environment with exogenous policy options: a large electorate of imperfectly informed voters almost always selects the correct policy option. Rather than directly voting for policies, citizens in modern representative democracies elect candidates who make strategic policy commitments. We show that intermediation by candidates sometimes improves policy choices and sometimes impedes information aggregation. Somewhat paradoxically, the possibility of information aggregation by voters encourages strategic conformism by candidates. Correlated information or partisan biases among voters can mitigate the political failure we un- cover. We also discuss possible institutional solutions.

Keywords: information aggregation; elections; representative democracy; Elections; Information aggregation; Representative democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 10 pages
Date: 2022-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Games and Economic Behavior, 1, September, 2022, 135, pp. 86 - 95. ISSN: 0899-8256

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/115180/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:115180

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().