Flexibility vs. protection from an unrepresentative legislative majority

Brett Graham and Dan Bernhardt

Games and Economic Behavior, 2015, vol. 93, issue C, 59-88

Abstract: We derive the equilibrium institutional design of representative democracy by citizens who first vote on the supermajority required for a new policy to be adopted, and then delegate decision making to a legislature that selects policy given that institutional constraint. A legislature that can freely tailor policy to reflect society's current preferences is good. However, the views of the median legislator or agenda setter may differ from the median citizen's, and an unchecked legislature can implement bad policy. We characterize how the primitives describing the preferences of actors and the status quo policy affect the equilibrium degree of legislative flexibility.

Keywords: Supermajority; Agenda setting; Legislative bargaining; Delegated decision making; Voting rules (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825615001037
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:gamebe:v:93:y:2015:i:c:p:59-88

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2015.07.004

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().