Informational Consequences of Agenda Procedures

Abstract

Agenda procedures are an important aspect of political decision making in legislatures. This paper compares different agenda forms and evaluates them on their ability to amalgamate information. I model voters with private information, but subject to party pressures, voting in a common value environment and use this model to compare different agenda forms. Special attention is paid to two agenda forms commonly used in practice: the amendment agenda and the sequential elimination agenda. I find that amendment agendas select superior outcomes more often than sequential elimination agendas when there is much ex-ante uncertainty; that the amendment agenda is better able to extract information from votes, but this information can be to the detriment of a group if information is of poor quality.