The Number of Parties and Decision-Making in Legislatures

Marina Bannikova, Artyom Jelnov and Pavel Jelnov
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Marina Bannikova: Avinguda de l’Eix Central, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, 08193 Barcelona, Spain

Games, 2021, vol. 12, issue 4, 1-10

Abstract: This paper proposes a model of a legislature, formed by several parties, which has to vote for or against a certain bill in the presence of a lobbyist interested in a certain vote outcome. We show that the ease with which the lobbyist can manipulate a legislature decision increases with the number of elected parties, and, consequently, decreases with an electoral threshold. On the other hand, a lower electoral threshold increases the representativeness of a legislature. We combine these two effects in a notion of fairness. We show the existence of an electoral threshold that optimizes the fairness of a political system, which is close to 1–5%. Namely, the optimal threshold (in our sense) is close to thresholds that exist in most parliamentary democracies.

Keywords: voting; legislature; lobbyist; parties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Related works:
Working Paper: The number of parties and decision making in legislatures (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jgames:v:12:y:2021:i:4:p:76-:d:654572

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