Suchergebnisse

Defence date: 22 November 2013 ; This thesis is a collection of three essays on voting as a means of collective decision- making. The first chapter builds a model of how voters should optimally behave in a legislative election with three parties under plurality rule. I show that, in contrast to single district elections, properties such as polarisation and misaligned voting can be mitigated in legislative elections. The second chapter studies a model of committee decision making where members have career concerns and a principal can choose the level of transparency (how much of the committees decision he can observe). We show that increased transparency leads to a breakdown in information aggregation, but that this may actually increase the principal's payoff. The theoretical model is then tested in a laboratory experiment. The final chapter introduces a model of legislative bargaining where three parties in the legislature bargain over the formation of government by choosing a policy and a distribution of government perks. I show that when individual politicians are responsible for the policies they implement - that is, those outside of government are not held accountable by voters for the implemented governments policies, while each individual politician in the ruling coalition is - then a given seat distribution can result in almost any two party coalition. ; -- Voting in legislative elections under plurality rule -- How transparency kills information aggregation (and why that may be good) -- Legislative bargaining with accountability

Models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen – extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when single district elections are used to fill a legislature, we get back to a world where the median voter matters. An extreme policy will generally only come about if it is preferred to a more moderate policy by the median voter in a majority of districts. The mere existence of a centrist party can lead to moderate outcomes even if the party itself wins few seats. I also show that, while some voters in a district will not vote for their nationally preferred party, in many equilibria they will want the candidate for whom they vote to win that district. This is never the case in single district elections. There, some voters always want the candidate they voted for to lose.