Abstract
This paper proposes a mechanism to overcome the possibility that political parties may block the nomination of High-Court judges when the Parliament is involved in their nomination and their mandate expires on a fixed date. This possibility arises when the default option is that the judge whose mandate expires holds office until an agreement is reached. Our proposal consists of changing the default option by a weighted lottery, related to the shares in Parliament of the different parties. We show that this mechanism is capable of solving the problem under reasonable conditions and implementing a politically balanced solution.
Highlights
There are a number of relevant instances when political parties have to agree on the choice of candidates for some public institutions. This is the case in many countries for regulatory committees, central bank councils or High Courts
The origin of this paper lies in a real life problem of this sort: the difficulties involved in replacing Spanish Constitutional Court judges over the last few years. This High Court consists of twelve magistrates, eight of whom are chosen in Parliament
We have seen that negotiations are most likely to fail when the status quo is the default option
Summary
There are a number of relevant instances when political parties have to agree on the choice of candidates for some public institutions. The origin of this paper lies in a real life problem of this sort: the difficulties involved in replacing Spanish Constitutional Court judges over the last few years This High Court consists of twelve magistrates, eight of whom are chosen in Parliament (four in each of the two Chambers).. Nash equilibrium; and (iv) The results are robust to the case of bi-dimensional preferences (i.e. when parties care about both the candidates’ ideology and their capabilities) All those results are simple derivations of the non-cooperative theory of bargaining, following the seminal work of Rubinstein (1982), and are closely related to legislative bargaining and arbitration models (Baron and Ferejohn 1989; Banks and Duggan 2006; Cardona and Ponsati 2011; Mylovanov and Zapechelnyuk 2013).
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