Co-Voting Democracy: Bridging Direct and Representative Democracy

Hans Gersbach

No 12429, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We provide a rationale for Co-Voting, a decision-making procedure that blends elements of direct and representative democracy to mitigate their main inefficiencies. A randomly selected group of citizens receives voting rights on specific issues, with their collective decision aggregated with parliament’s decision according to a pre-specified weight. Using a simple model, we show that Co-Voting acts as an insurance device against both uninformed decisions in direct democracy and decision biases in representative democracy. We further introduce Co-Del-Voting, which adds strategic delegation to parliament and strictly outperforms both systems. Finally, we outline possible extensions and a roadmap for implementation.

Keywords: direct democracy; representative democracy; constitution; co-voting; biases; information asymmetry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D70 D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12429

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