Today, several social movements in western democracies argue that traditional representative democracy has failed to adequately represent the will of the “people”, and instead support direct ...democracy as the only political system to restore the will of the majority. We analyze under what conditions the policy – a vector of decisions on every issue – implemented by the winner of a bipartisan electoral competition coincides with the policy that citizens would choose by means of direct democracy. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for this equivalence to hold, implying that, as long as at least one of them is not fulfilled, a divergence of outcomes between direct and representative democracy arises. The first condition requires that the outcome of majority voting issue-by-issue is the Condorcet winner relative to the voters’ preference profile over the set of policies. The second requires that either that outcome is the preferred policy for at least one of the candidates, or that candidates’ preferred policies differ on every single issue. We reinterpret some findings in the literature in the light of our model and present them as potential reasons why the equivalence between direct and representative democracy may fail.
•We find necessary and sufficient conditions for the coincidence of policies implemented under direct and representative democracy.•Loosely divided electorates and highly polarized politicians favor such a coincidence.•The bundling of issues by politicians does not jeopardize the coincidence.
Demand of direct democracy Correa-Lopera, Guadalupe
European Journal of Political Economy,
12/2019, Volume:
60
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The growing demand for referendum challenges the traditional model of representative democracy. In this paper we study under which conditions voters prefer a system of representative democracy to ...direct democracy. In direct democracies voters choose a policy among two alternatives, under uncertainty about which policy better fits the realized state of the world; in representative democracies voters select a candidate who, once elected, chooses a policy having observed which is the realized state of the world. Voters and politicians' payoffs depend on a common component which is positive only if the policy fits the state of the world, and on a private ideological bias towards one of the policies. In direct democracies voters are uncertain about the future state of the world, while in representative democracies they are uncertain about the degree of ideological bias of the candidates, even if they know towards which policy each candidate is biased. We show that representative democracy is preferred if (i) the majority of voters are pragmatic (the common component prevails), and (ii) society is ideologically polarized, meaning that the majority of voters are ideological (the private component prevails), but the median voter is pragmatic. Direct democracy is the preferred instrument for collective choices in societies in which the majority of voters and the median voter are ideological, implying that the majority of voters have the same ideological bias, as, for instance, it occurs when the populist rhetoric of people against the elite succeeds.
We study voting problems with an odd number of agents and single-peaked preferences. With only three alternatives, there are scoring rules that yield the Condorcet winner only for committees of three ...and five agents. With four or more alternatives, only committees of three agents work. In all these scoring rules, the best and worst alternatives are assigned a score of 1and 0, respectively, and any middle alternative a score between 0 and 12. For five or more alternatives, the score of any middle alternative must be the same, and we call this family semiplurality scoring rules.
•Scoring rules yielding the Condorcet winner exist only for 3 and 5 agents’ boards.•Best and worst alternative’ scores are 1 and 0. Middle options’ scores go from 0 to 12.•For 5 or more alternatives, the score of any middle alternative must be the same.•Semiplurality scoring rules have middle alternatives’ score going from 0 to 12.
The growing demand for referendums challenges the traditional model of representative democracy. Why may voters prefer to decide by themselves (direct democracy) rather than delegate on their ...representatives (representative democracy)? We propose a model in which voters select either a policy or a representative under uncertainty over the socially correct policy. Under direct democracy, the policy selected by voters is implemented, while under representative democracy the elected representative decides the policy. We assume that representatives have informational advantage. Our main result shows that a society in which the majority of voters are selfish may prefer a system of political representation when they are strongly ideologically polarized. If, instead of ideological confrontation, there is consensus among these selfish voters, referendum is the preferred instrument for making decisions. Non-selfish societies, however, always prefer to delegate on better informed representatives.
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