Optimal committee design and political participation

Nikitas Konstantinidis

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2013, vol. 25, issue 4, 443-466

Abstract: Building on a Condorcetian common-values framework, this paper tackles the question of optimal committee formation within a community of finite size. Solving for the Bayesian information aggregation game yields some interesting normative results that emphasize the presence of informational externalities as root causes of suboptimally low voluntary participation levels in communal decision-making and the potentially Pareto-enhancing nature of drafting vis-Ã -vis decentralized mechanisms of self-selection. I firstly derive the optimal size of a committee based on the assumption of informative voting and, then, I show that it is globally optimal amongst all voting equilibrium strategies. I subsequently compare it to the various symmetric equilibria that may arise in a complete information setting or a Bayesian environment with heterogeneous private costs. I finally sketch out an optimal transfer scheme that can ex ante implement the socially efficient committee size.

Keywords: Committee design; Condorcet jury theorem; mechanism design; political participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:25:y:2013:i:4:p:443-466

DOI: 10.1177/0951629812470557

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