The number of parties and decision-making in legislatures
This paper proposes a model of a legislature, formed by several parties, which has to vote for or against a certain bill in the presence of a lobbyist interested in a certain vote outcome. We show that the ease with which the lobbyist can manipulate a legislature decision increases with the number o...
| Autores: | , , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2021 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:252024 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/252024 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.3390/g12040076 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Voting Legislature Lobbyist Parties |
| Sumario: | This paper proposes a model of a legislature, formed by several parties, which has to vote for or against a certain bill in the presence of a lobbyist interested in a certain vote outcome. We show that the ease with which the lobbyist can manipulate a legislature decision increases with the number of elected parties, and, consequently, decreases with an electoral threshold. On the other hand, a lower electoral threshold increases the representativeness of a legislature. We combine these two effects in a notion of fairness. We show the existence of an electoral threshold that optimizes the fairness of a political system, which is close to 1-5%. Namely, the optimal threshold (in our sense) is close to thresholds that exist in most parliamentary democracies. |
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