Propose or Vote: A Canonical Democratic Procedure

Hans Gersbach

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper introduces Propose or Vote (PoV), a democratic procedure for collective decision-making and elections that does not rely on a central mechanism designer. In the first stage, members of a polity choose whether to become proposal-makers or to participate only as voters. In the second stage, voters decide by majority voting over the set of submitted proposals. With appropriately chosen default points, PoV implements the Condorcet winner in a single round of voting whenever one exists. We show that this implementation is globally unique when the number of members is odd; for an even number of members, uniqueness can be restored by adding an artificial agent. PoV can also be applied to elections, where agents decide whether to stand as candidates or vote over the resulting candidate set.

Date: 2025-06, Revised 2025-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-des, nep-mic and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05998 Latest 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:arx:papers:2506.05998

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().