Cloud Voting

Hans Gersbach and Elias Kolleck

No 13120, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We introduce Cloud Voting, a constitutional rule allocating final authority between citizens and parliament according to turnout of voters. Costly information acquisition and differential participation can make turnout informative about issue magnitude and institutional reliability. We characterize when optimal turnout-contingent authority takes a threshold form. Low parliamentary bias yields an optimal parliament-to-citizen threshold. With moderate bias, turnout can signal parliamentary reliability, and optimal authority can be nonmonotone. Holding information acquisition and participation fixed, the optimal turnout-only rule weakly lowers expected policy loss relative to either fixed-authority benchmark, with strict improvements when each institution is strictly preferable at supported turnout levels.

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:_13120

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