Sixty-Four Percent Majority Rule in Ducal Venice: Voting for the Doge

Jay Coggins and Federico Perali

Public Choice, 1998, vol. 97, issue 4, 709-23

Abstract: A recent result of A. Caplin and B. Nalebuff (1988) demonstrates that, under certain conditions on individual preferences and their distribution across society, super-majority rule performs well as a social decision rule. If the required super-majority is chosen appropriately, the rule yields a unique winner and voter cycles cannot occur. The voting procedure for electing a doge in medieval Venice, developed in 1268, employed a super-majority requirement agreeing with the Caplin and Nalebuff formula. The authors present a brief history of the Venetian political institutions, show how the rule was employed, and argue that it contributed to the remarkable centuries-long political stability of Venice. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:97:y:1998:i:4:p:709-23

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().