Republic or Democracy? Co-voting!

Hans Gersbach, Akaki Mamageishvili and Oriol Tejada

No 17614, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We analyze a new constitutional decision-making rule—called †Co-Voting†—which can be described as a combination of representative democracy (or republic, where citizens delegate their decision power to a parliament) and direct democracy (or just democracy, where citizens decide through referenda). We consider a simple model in which the electorate is partially uninformed about the consequences of policies and parliament members have biased preferences regarding policy. Taking a constitutional perspective, we characterize the model primitives for which Co-Voting yields higher welfare than both direct democracy and representative democracy, which are natural benchmarks. The relative merits of Co-Voting continue to hold if proposal-making by parliament is strategic.

JEL-codes: D02 D70 D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10
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