Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP17614
Authors: Hans Gersbach; Akaki Mamageishvili; Oriol Tejada
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 partiallyuninformed 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.
Keywords: direct democracy; representative democracy; constitution; voting; bias; information asymmetry
JEL Codes: D02; D70; D72; D82
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| citizens' informational asymmetry (D82) | decision-making outcomes (D70) |
| parliament members' biased preferences (D72) | decision-making outcomes (D70) |
| covoting (C10) | decision-making outcomes (D70) |
| covoting (C10) | welfare outcomes (I38) |
| welfare outcomes under covoting (D72) | welfare outcomes under direct democracy (D69) |
| parliament's bias relative to citizens' lack of information (D72) | welfare outcomes under covoting (D72) |