The Delegation Perspective on Representative Democracy

Roland Hain and Manipushpak Mitra

No 17/2002, Bonn Econ Discussion Papers from University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE)

Abstract: Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information gathering. We show that there is an optimal assembly size that would be chosen at a constitutional stage. This implies a relationship between assembly and constituency size. We then compared this relationship to actual data. Fitting a single parameter to the data, we show that our model can explain the actual relationship between assembly and constituency size quite well.

Keywords: Constitutional Design; Representative Democracy; Parliament Size; Information Costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D82 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:bonedp:172002

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