Supermajority Rule Research Articles

How the Republic of Venice chose its Doge: lot-based elections and supermajority rule

We study a family of voting rules inspired by the peculiar protocol used for over 500 years by the Republic of Venice to elect its Doge. Lot-based indirect elections have two main features: a pool of delegates is chosen by lot out of a general assembly, and then they vote in a single winner election with qualified majority. Under the assumption that the assembly is divided into two factions, we characterise the win probability of the minority and show that these features promote a more equitable allocation of political representation, striking a balance between protecting the minority and giving proper recognition to the majority. We then consider this family of voting procedures from a constitutional perspective: we analyse how the electoral result varies with the college size and the winning threshold in order to understand how these two parameters can be tuned when drawing up electoral law. We find that minorities are better off with larger majority thresholds. The role of the college size, on the other hand, is ambiguous: a smaller college size offers more protection to sparse minorities; for more sizeable ones, it depends instead on the qualified majority required for the election.

How the Republic of Venice Chose Its Doge: Lot-Based Elections and Supermajority Rule

We study a family of voting rules inspired by the peculiar protocol used for over 500 years by the Republic of Venice to elect its Doge. Such lot-based indirect elections have two main features: a pool of delegates is chosen by lot out of a general assembly, and then they vote in a single winner election with qualified majority. Under the assumption that the assembly is divided in two factions, we characterise the win probability of the minority and study how it varies with the electoral college size and the winning threshold. We argue that these features promoted a more equitable allocation of political representation and thus may have contributed to the political stability of the Republic of Venice.

Optimal Majority Rule in Referenda

Adopting the group turnout model of Herrera and Mattozzi, J. Eur. Econ. Assoc. 2010, 8, 838–871, we investigate direct democracy with supermajority rule and different preference intensities for two sides of a referendum: Reform versus status quo. Two parties spend money and effort to mobilize their voters. We characterize the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria. We investigate the optimal majority rule that maximizes voters’ welfare. Using an example, we show that the relationship between the optimal majority rule and the preference intensity is not monotonic—the optimal majority rule is initially decreasing and then increasing in the preference intensity of the status quo side. We also show that when the preference intensity of the status quo side is higher, the easiness to mobilize voters on the status quo side is lower, or the payoff that the reform party receives is higher, the optimal majority rule is more likely to be supermajority.

Redistribution under General Decision Rules

We study the political economy of redistribution over a broad class of decision rules. Since the core is generically non-unique, we suggest a simple and elegant procedure to select a robust equilibrium. Our selected policy depends on the full income profile, and in particular, on the preferences of two decisive voters. The effect of increasing inequality on redistribution depends on the decision rule and the shape of the income distribution; redistribution will increase if both decisive voters are 'relatively poor', and decrease if at least one is sufficiently 'rich'. Additionally, redistribution decreases as the polity adopts increasingly stringent super-majority rules.

Collective decision-making of voters with heterogeneous levels of rationality

This paper studies the collective decision-making processes of voters who have heterogeneous levels of rationality. Specifically, we consider a voting body consisting of both rational and sincere voters. Rational voters vote strategically, correctly using both their private information and the information implicit in other voters’ actions to make decisions; sincere voters vote according to their private information alone. We first characterize the conditions under which the presence of sincere voters increases, reduces, or does not alter the probabilities of making correct collective decisions. We also discuss how the probabilities change when the incidence of sincere voters in the population varies. We then characterize the necessary and sufficient condition under which informational efficiency can be achieved when sincere voters coexist with rational voters. We find that when sincere voters are present, supermajority rules with high consensus levels are not as desirable as they are in rational voting models, as informational efficiency fails under such voting rules.

An informational role of supermajority rules in monitoring the majority party's activities

There often exists a supermajority rule that enables the minority party to delay or prevent a vote on a bill. I construct a two‐period model consisting of a representative voter, self‐interested parties, and a media outlet. In the model, the majority party has an incentive to misrepresent the voter's optimal policy. I show that the minority party's attempt to block a vote (e.g., a filibuster) can signal this misrepresentation. Interestingly, the key is that the minority party and the mass media are complementary in creating the signal. Overall, the results suggest that supermajority rules could be beneficial even for the majority of voters.

Do Supermajority Rules Really Deter Extremism? The Role of Electoral Competition

This study investigates how supermajority rules in a legislature affect electoral competition. To this end, we construct a probabilistic voting model and show that supermajority rules magnify the divergence of policy platforms generated by aggregate uncertainty about the electoral outcome. Thus, supermajority rules involve an important trade-off: they induce the convergence of policies for non-commitment issues, while also causing the divergence of policies for commitment issues. In addition, we show that the effect of aggregate uncertainty on the optimal voting rule depends on whether its source is a large district-specific shock or a small number of competitive districts.

Supermajority rule, the law of 1/n, and government spending: a synthesis

I develop models in which a minimum winning coalition decides on the level of government spending, where the Coase theorem holds amongst members of the winning coalition. An increase in the supermajority requirement has potentially conflicting effects on spending. A higher requirement increases the tax price internalized by the minimum winning coalition, but also increases the number of districts included in this coalition. I develop separate models in which the spending in question consists of (i) a nonexcludable good, (ii) a distributive consumption good, (iii) infrastructure spending and (iv) a transfer payment. A supermajority rule has no effect on spending for nonexcludable goods and ambiguous effects on spending for distributive projects and infrastructure spending. An increased supermajority requirement does unambiguously reduce transfer spending. I also relate the supermajority rule to the law of 1/n. If the Coase Theorem holds and a minimum winning coalition forms, an increase in the number of districts n has precisely the same effect on overall expenditure as a decrease in the supermajority requirement. Thus, the ambiguous spending effects stemming from supermajority rule carry over into this version of the law of 1/n.

Full Information Equivalence in Large Elections

We study the problem of aggregating private information in elections with two or more alternatives. We characterize environments where information can be aggregated asymptotically by a sequence of equilibria of voting games as the electorate grows large and explore the implications for the information structure. Information aggregation is generically possible when the signal space is rich relative to the state space, and fails robustly when the state space is rich relative to the signal space. We focus on plurality rule, but our results extend to supermajority rules and a large family of scoring rules which includes the approval rule.

Representation, sophisticated voting, and the size of the gridlock region

We propose a formal model that investigates the institutional cause of the expansion of the gridlock region in a legislative body under supermajority rule. We show that the interaction between a legislative election and the supermajority rule in the legislative policy-making process causes an expansion of the size of the gridlock region under certain circumstances. More specifically, if the position of the status quo is neither too moderate nor too extreme, then certain voters will be incentivized to elect a more extreme representative than themselves, and this sophisticated voting results in the expansion of the size of the gridlock region. As a result, our model demonstrates that the expansion of the gridlock region is caused in part by sophisticated voting independent of the voters’ ideological distribution.

Supermajority Rule, the Law of 1/n, and Government Spending: A Synthesis

I develop models in which a minimum winning coalition decides on the level of government spending, where the Coase theorem holds amongst members of the winning coalition. An increase in the supermajority requirement has potentially conflicting effects on spending. A higher requirement increases the tax price internalized by the minimum winning coalition, but also increases the number of districts included in this coalition. I develop separate models in which the spending in question consists of (i) a nonexcludable good, (ii) a distributive consumption good, (iii) infrastructure spending and (iv) a transfer payment. A supermajority rule has no effect on spending for nonexcludable goods and ambiguous effects on spending for distributive projects and infrastructure spending. An increase supermajority rule does unambiguously reduce transfer spending. I also relate the supermajority rule to the law of 1/n. Under one particular conception of the law of 1/n, an increase in the number of districts n has precisely the same effect on overall expenditure as a decrease in the supermajority requirement. Thus, the ambiguous spending effects stemming from supermajority rule carry over into this version of the law of 1/n.

Deliberating Collective Decisions

We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date, agents decide whether to vote to adopt one of two alternatives or continue to collect more information. The process stops when a qualified majority vote for an alternative. Three main insights emerge from our analysis and are consistent with an array of stylized facts regarding committee decision making. First, majority rule is more vulnerable than super-majority rules to the disproportionate influence of impatient committee members. Second, more diverse preferences, more patient members, or more unanimous decision voting rules lead to lengthier deliberation and more accurate decisions. Finally, balanced committees unanimously prefer to delegate deliberation power to a moderate chairman rather than be governed by a rule such as unanimity.

An Informational Role of Supermajority Rules in Monitoring the Majority Party's Activities

Filibuster is often regarded as just an attempt to prevent a bill which is undesirable for a minority party. However, in reality, the minority party tries to attract public awareness and send a message to voters through filibuster. I examine whether this message is credible or not. I show that (i) when there exists mass media, filibuster can sometimes be a credible signal such that a majority party intentionally misrepresents a good policy for voters. As a result, (ii) filibuster can be beneficial even for the majority of voters. In addition, (iii) I examine how the credibility of this message depends on a status quo policy and partisanship. Overall, (iv) this study demonstrates that a minority party and mass media are complementary in creating a credible signal.

Voting and Contributing When the Group is Watching

Members of groups and organizations often have to decide on rules that regulate their contributions to common tasks. They typically differ in their propensity to contribute and often care about the image they project, in particular want to be perceived by other group members as being high contributors. In such environments we study the interaction between the way members vote on rules and their subsequent contribution decisions. We show that multiple norms can emerge. We draw surprising policy implications, on the effect of group size, of supermajority rules and of the observability of actions.

An Exploration of Differential State Responses to Changes in Fiscal Conditions

This paper explores legislative tax changes adopted by states in the face of exogenous budget gaps (projected deficits or surpluses) over the period 1999–2011. Our conceptual framework is based on the premise that states will respond differently to temporary budget changes than to permanent changes. The framework suggests four sets of explanatory factors beyond the size of the budget gap in explaining legislative tax changes, namely the other fiscal options for addressing the gap, the nature of political party control of state government, budgetary institutions, and socio‐economic characteristics of the state. We find supportive evidence of our hypotheses that legislative tax changes are affected by a state's budget gap, reserves, debt, unified political control, and super majority rules for tax increases, but not by balanced budget rules or changes in expenditures.

Supermajority rule and bicameral bargaining

This paper revisits the claim that supermajority rules and bicameral legislative structures restrain excessive government spending and taxation. Our analysis suggests that the extension effect of a supermajority rule—that requires logrolling across additional members—increases with the ratio of seats in the House relative to seats in the Senate. Using a panel of US states, 1970–2008, we find that the ratio of House-to-Senate seats has a robust, positive impact on the tendency of a supermajority rule to inflate the budget. Our finding implies that a supermajority rule can have a perverse effect on budget outcomes in bicameral legislatures owing to two factors: the geographic overlap between chambers and the low price elasticity of demand for public goods.

Public Choice Originalism: Bork, Buchanan and the Escape from the Progressive Paradigm

In this essay I explore the connections between public choice and originalism, arguing that public choice is crucial to development of the originalism both in its diffuse popular and more academic form. As Robert Bork’s famous article, Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems, illustrates, originalism begins as a reaction to the Warren Court, but it is a reaction that largely accepts the primacy of democratic majoritarianism that had begun in the Progressive era. It is public choice more than any other theory of politics that loosens the straightjacket that majoritarianism has on constitutional theory. In its more diffuse form, public choice with its emphasis on the self- interested nature of politicians, the power of interest groups, and the pathologies of collective choice made majority rule less attractive. James Buchanan’s contribution with Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent has particular relevance to originalism, because it decisively breaks from the idea that majority rule should be the presumptive norm in constitutional republics. If constitutions are best made by supermajority rules, as Buchanan and Tullock imply, originalism can be justified as a way of protecting the results of supermajoritarian constitutionmaking from change by either majorities or the peculiar submajorities that are comprised by the justices of the Supreme Court. As important as are the interpretive disputes within originalism, like that between original intent and public meaning, public choice’s inflection point may be more important because it moves originalism from a theory that was concerned primarily with protecting democratic majorities to a theory that was concerned with preserving a republican regime that was in its formation and essence nonmajoritarian. That shift in turn empowered originalism to become a much more aggressive theory of judicial review of legislation, creating more potential conflict between the judiciary and legislative majorities. The essay also briefly critiques some constitutional theorists who have stayed within the Progressive Paradigm, because their theories fail to solve the countermajoritarian difficulty at its heart. It ends with a description of four problems that public choice originalism has yet fully to address.

Oversized Government Coalitions in Latin America

Research on executive-legislative relations in presidential systems have emphasized how presidents use cabinet appointments to form and manage government coalitions in the absence of majority legislative support. Yet not all coalitions are similar, as some are larger and, consequently, more prone to agency and coordination problems than others. But what shapes presidents’ decision to include more parties in their coalitions? While several hypotheses exist in the literature, few have been tested in a systematic fashion, none focusing on why surplus coalitions form. This article intends to fill this gap by examining an original time-series cross-sectional dataset comprising 168 unique coalitions in all 18 Latin American presidential countries since 1979. In particular, I find that highly fragmented party systems and presidents with great legislative powers are more likely to generate oversized government coalitions. An additional analysis, with monthly data from Brazilian cabinets between 1989 and 2010, also shows that supermajority rules and bicameralism dynamics play a role in the occurrence of surplus coalitions, but party discipline and presidential approval do not.

Majority Rule and Utilitarian Welfare

We study the welfare properties of majority and supermajority rules when voting is costly and values, costs, and electorate sizes are all random. Unlike previous work, where the electorate size was either fixed or Poisson distributed, and exhibited no limiting dispersion, we allow for general distributions that permit substantial dispersion. We identify conditions on these distributions guaranteeing that a large election under majority rule produces the utilitarian choice with probability one. Absent these conditions, nonutilitarian outcomes are possible, as we demonstrate. We also show that majority rule is the only voting rule with the utilitarian property—strict supermajority rules are not utilitarian. (JEL D71, D72)

Supermajority rule and the law of 1/n

This paper investigates the impact of a supermajority rule on the law of 1/n, which posits that a larger number of districts increases the size of government. Our analysis suggests that supermajority rule, despite the claim that it restrains excessive spending, increases the 1/n effect, because qualified majorities require logrolling to attract additional members. Using data from US states from 1970 to 2007, we find that the adoption of a supermajority rule has a robust, worsening effect on the fiscal commons problem identified by the law of 1/n.