|
on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Chad Kendall |
| Abstract: | I study how political parties affect representation in the U.S. House. To do so, I account for party pressure on the votes of members in an otherwise standard spatial model that uses roll call voting patterns to identify member ideologies. I simultaneously estimate voter ideologies from survey responses, leveraging their responses on issues before Congress to bridge voters and members into the same ideological space. I find that, relative to a model without party pressure, member ideologies and those of their constituents are much more closely aligned. The results imply that, in terms of actual votes, parties drive a wedge between members and those they represent. I provide evidence that parties do so strategically, balancing the need for legislative wins and the electoral concerns of their members. |
| Keywords: | political representation, party discipline, party pressure |
| JEL: | P0 D72 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12391 |
| By: | Manik Dhar; Kunal Mittal; Clayton Thomas |
| Abstract: | Among two-candidate elections that treat the candidates symmetrically and never result in a tie, which voting rules are fair? A natural requirement is that each voter exerts an equal influence over the outcome, i.e., is equally likely to swing the election one way or the other. A voter's influence has been formalized in two canonical ways: the Shapley-Shubik (1954) index and the Banzhaf (1964) index. We consider both indices, and ask: Which electorate sizes admit a fair voting rule (under the respective index)? For an odd number $n$ of voters, simple majority rule is an example of a fair voting rule. However, when $n$ is even, fair voting rules can be challenging to identify, and a diverse literature has studied this problem under different notions of fairness. Our main results completely characterize which values of $n$ admit fair voting rules under the two canonical indices we consider. For the Shapley-Shubik index, a fair voting rule exists for $n>1$ if and only if $n$ is not a power of $2$. For the Banzhaf index, a fair voting rule exists for all $n$ except $2$, $4$, and $8$. Along the way, we show how the Shapley-Shubik and Banzhaf indices relate to the winning coalitions of the voting rule, and compare these indices to previously considered notions of fairness. |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2602.13894 |
| By: | Thorsten Drautzburg; Igor Livshits; Mark L. J. Wright |
| Abstract: | In a canonical model of policy formation, campaign contributions, and electoral competition, we show that, despite donor polarization, candidates’ agendas converge. If purely office-motivated candidates move away from the centrist agenda, they increase their opponents’ contributions more than their own. An extension that introduces a “job ladder” for the candidates leads to candidates caring about absolute levels of campaign contributions and generates divergence of political agendas in equilibrium. We provide empirical evidence of campaign contributions affecting candidates’ chances of “promotion, ” and characterize key comparative statics of the extended model. In the model, caps on campaign contributions lower polarization in equilibrium. |
| Keywords: | Polarization; Campaign Contributions; Agendas |
| JEL: | D72 H41 |
| Date: | 2026–03–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fedpwp:102846 |
| By: | Hans Gersbach |
| 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 |
| JEL: | D02 D70 D72 D82 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12429 |
| By: | Enrico Manfredi |
| Abstract: | Collective decision-making can be viewed as the problem of aggregating multiple noisy information channels about an unknown state of the world. Classical epistemic justifications of majority rule rely on restrictive assumptions about the homogeneity and symmetry of these channels, which are often violated in realistic environments. This paper introduces the Epistemic Shared-Choice Mechanism (ESCM), a lightweight and auditable procedure that endogenously estimates issue-specific signal reliability and assigns bounded, decision-specific voting weights. Using central limit approximations, the paper provides an analytical comparison between ESCM and unweighted majority rule, showing how their relative epistemic performance depends on the distributional structure of information in the population, including unimodal competence distributions and segmented environments with informed minorities. The results indicate that endogenous and bounded epistemic weighting can improve collective accuracy by merging procedural and epistemic requirements. |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2602.13499 |