Content-Based Agendas and Qualified Majorities in Sequential Voting
American Economic Review
vol. 107,
no. 6, June 2017
(pp. 1477-1506)
Abstract
We analyze sequential, binary voting schemes in settings where several privately informed agents have single-peaked preferences over a finite set of alternatives, and we focus on robust equilibria that do not depend on assumptions about the players' beliefs about each other. Our main results identify two intuitive conditions on binary voting trees, ensuring that sincere voting at each stage forms an ex post perfect equilibrium. In particular, we uncover a strong rationale for content-based agendas: if the outcome should not be sensitive to beliefs about others, nor to the deployment of strategic skills, the agenda needs to be built "from the extremes to the middle" so that more extreme alternatives are both more difficult to adopt, and are put to vote before other, more moderate options. An important corollary is that, under simple majority, the equilibrium outcome of the incomplete information game is always the Condorcet winner. Finally, we aim to guide the practical design of schemes that are widely used by legislatures and committees and we illustrate our findings with several case studies.Citation
Kleiner, Andreas, and Benny Moldovanu. 2017. "Content-Based Agendas and Qualified Majorities in Sequential Voting." American Economic Review, 107 (6): 1477-1506. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20160277Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D71 Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations
- D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
- I10 Health: General
- J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- J32 Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Retirement Plans; Private Pensions
- K10 Basic Areas of Law: General (Constitutional Law)