Abstract
This paper examines the extent to which organizational hierarchies are democratic or (in the more usual language of administrative studies) participative, in the sense that the views of a large proportion of organizational membership are taken into account when an organizational choice is made. We view organizations as making choices in a "bottom-up" manner: subordinates recommend options to their superior, and if subordinates are in sufficient agreement their superior accepts their advice. We prove that as the number of levels in the hierarchy increases, organization- al choices can be dominated by a smaller and smaller proportion of the total organizational mem- bership. In the limit, a vanishing small proportion of the membership can dominate policymaking.
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