Democratic Policy Decisions with Decentralized Promises Contingent on Vote Outcome

17 Apr 2023  ·  Ali Lazrak, Jianfeng Zhang ·

We study pre-vote interactions in a committee that enacts a welfare-improving reform through voting. Committee members use decentralized promises contingent on the reform enactment to influence the vote outcome. Equilibrium promises prevent beneficial coalitional deviations and minimize total promises. We show that multiple equilibria exist, involving promises from high- to low-intensity members to enact the reform. Promises dissuade reform opponents from enticing the least enthusiastic reform supporters to vote against the reform. We explore whether some recipients of the promises can be supporters of the reform and discuss the impact of polarization on the total promises.

PDF Abstract
No code implementations yet. Submit your code now

Datasets


  Add Datasets introduced or used in this paper

Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods


No methods listed for this paper. Add relevant methods here