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Transparent decision-making processes are widely regarded as a prerequisite for the working of a representative democracy. It facilitates accountability, and citizens may suspect that decisions, if taken behind closed doors, do not promote their interests. Why else the secrecy? We provide a model of committee decision-making that explains the public's demand for transparency, and committee members' aversion to it. In line with case study evidence, we show how pressures to become transparent induce committee members to organize pre-meetings away from the public eye. Outcomes of pre-meetings are less determined, more anarchic, than those of formal meetings, but within bounds. We characterize feasible deals that are credible and will be endorsed in the formal meeting.

A committee makes a decision on a project on behalf of the public. Members of the committee agree on the a priori value of the project, and hold additional private information about its consequences. They are experts who care about the value of the project and about being considered well informed. Before voting on the project, members can exchange their private information simultaneously. We show that reputational concerns make the a priori unconventional decision more attractive and lead committees to show a united front. These results hold irrespective of whether information can be manipulated or not. Also, reputational concerns induce members to manipulate information and vote strategically if their preferences differ considerably from those of the member casting the decisive vote. Our last result is that the optimal voting rule balances the quality of information exchange and the alignment of interests of the decisive voter with those of the public.

When hiring an adviser (he), a policy maker (she) often faces the problem that she has incomplete information about his preferences. Some advisers are good, in the sense that their preferences are closely aligned to the policy maker's preferences, and some advisers are bad. Recently, some scholars have argued that the policy maker's power to replace her adviser induces the adviser to act more in line with the policy maker's interests. The idea is that the adviser's desire to put a stamp on future policy reduces his incentive to manipulate information. This paper shows that the policy maker's power to replace her adviser may harm her. The reason is that this power may have an adverse effect on the behavior of good advisers.

Democracies delegate substantial decision power to politicians. Using a model in which an incumbent can design, examine and implement public policies, we show that examination takes place in spite of, rather than thanks to, elections. Elections are needed as a carrot and a stick to motivate politicians, yet politicians who are overly interested in re-election shy away from policy examination. Our analysis sheds light on the distance created in mature democracies between the political process and the production of policy relevant information; on the role played by probing into candidates' past; and on the possibility of crowding out desirable political behaviour by increasing the value of holding office.

We study a model of collective decision making with endogenous information collection.Agents collect information about the consequences of a project, communicate, and then vote onthe project. We examine under what conditions communication may increase the probability thatgood decisions are made. Our most surprising result is that when there are no direct cost ofcommunication and communication can only help to identify the truth, more communication may reducethe probability that a correct decision is made. The reason for this result is that communicationmay aggravate the free-rider problem associated with collecting information.

Collective decision procedures should balance the incentives they provide toacquire information and their capacity to aggregate private information. In a decisionproblem in which a project can be accepted or rejected once information about its qualityhas been acquired or not, we compare the performance of a delegation structure with that oftwo voting procedures. Delegation makes one's acceptance decision pivotal by definition.The decisiveness of one's vote in a voting procedure depends on the other agent's vote.This in turn determines the decision to acquire information. In the debate about a rationalchoice foundation of Condorcet's Jury Theorem, the distribution of information was leftexogenous. Mixed (acceptance) strategies were required to validate the Theorem.Endogenizing information acquisition as we do reveals mixed (acceptance) strategies to bedetrimental for welfare as they lead to indifference between buying and not buyinginformation.

We analyse a game theoretical model in which policy makers have superior knowledge about the working of the economy relative to voters. We show that parties increase their chances of reelection by basing their policies on the model that best fits in with their preferences. Moreover, we show that if parties care much about holding office, they may deliberately base their policies on a model that is electorally attractive, even if this model does not describe the working of the economy correctly. Our paper provides an explanation for the observation that different political parties subscribe to different economic philosophies.