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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

"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is one of several federal agencies responsible for protecting Americans against significant risks to human health and the environment. As part of that mission, EPA estimates the nature, magnitude, and likelihood of risks to human health and the environment; identifies the potential regulatory actions that will mitigate those risks and protect public health1 and the environment; and uses that information to decide on appropriate regulatory action. Uncertainties, both qualitative and quantitative, in the data and analyses on which these decisions are based enter into the process at each step. As a result, the informed identification and use of the uncertainties inherent in the process is an essential feature of environmental decision making. EPA requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) convene a committee to provide guidance to its decision makers and their partners in states and localities on approaches to managing risk in different contexts when uncertainty is present. It also sought guidance on how information on uncertainty should be presented to help risk managers make sound decisions and to increase transparency in its communications with the public about those decisions. Given that its charge is not limited to human health risk assessment and includes broad questions about managing risks and decision making, in this report the committee examines the analysis of uncertainty in those other areas in addition to human health risks. Environmental Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty explains the statement of task and summarizes the findings of the committee."--Publisher's description

This article reports the findings of a series of experiments on committee decision making under majority rule. The committee members had relatively fixed preferences, so that the process was one of making decisions rather than one of problem solving. The predictions of a variety of models drawn from Economics, Sociology, Political Science and Game Theory were compared to the experimental results. One predictive concept, the core of the noncooperative game without side payments (equivalent to the majority rule equilibrium) consistently performed best. Significantly, however, even when such an outcome did not exist, the experimental results did not display the degree of unpredictability that some theoretical work would suggest. An important subsidiary finding concerns the difference between experiments conducted under conditions of high stakes versus those conducted under conditions of much lower stakes. The findings in the two conditions differed considerably, thus calling into question the political applicability of numerous social psychological experiments in which subjects had little or no motivation.

We investigate the implications for the setting of interest rateswhen monetary policy decisions are taken by a committee, in whicha subset of members may meet prior to the voting in the committeeand therefore has the possibility to reach consensus ex ante to voteunanimously ex post. We allow for different committee sizes, variousvoting rules and differences in skills among committee members. Wefind that the size of the committee is much less important in deter-mining the degree of interest rate inertia than the skills of committeemembers. Moreover, prior interaction of a subgroup only has a minoreffect on the setting of interest rates by the committee, provided thatmembers on average are equally skilled and voting takes place using asimple majority rule. If either of those assumptions are relaxed, priorinteraction has substantial effects on the setting of interest rates. Inaddition, prior interaction increases the optimal size of the Committee,ceteris paribus.

The conciliation committee is the ultimate inter-cameral dispute settlement mechanism of the ordinary (former codecision) legislative procedure of the European Union. Who gets what, and why, in this committee? Are the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers on an equal footing? Upon a closer examination, the institutional set-up of the committee is bias in favour of the Council. The present research investigates under which conditions the European Parliament may be more successful in conciliation bargaining, by three integrating analyses. First, through Wordfish I conduct quantitative text analysis estimating the similarity between the documents of almost all the dossiers that reached conciliation up to February 2012. This evidence suggests that, in almost seventy per cent of times, the final agreement is more similar to the position of the Council. As expected, the Parliament has been more successful after the reform of the Treaty of Amsterdam and in dossiers where the Council decides by qualified majority voting. The Parliament also benefits if the rapporteur comes from a large party because a veto threat is more easily executable. In line with König et al. (2007), the support from the Commission as well as when national administrations are more involved in implementation than the Commission are crucial to parliamentary success. Second, a qualitative expert survey provides an in-depth contribution to the variables affecting legislative outcome for a broad array of cases. The discussions engaged key actors, both from the Council and Parliament, about several dossiers reached the conciliation. The qualitative analysis motivates some of the hypotheses confirmed by the quantitative empirical tests. It investigates the causal mechanism of the rapporteur's party affiliation, the membership length of the Council president and the Commission's role, while the personality of the relays actors and the relationship of the assembly with the public opinion, which were not analysed quantitatively, are likely to exert constraints on parliamentarians in finding an agreement or raising the disagreement value they attach to dossiers. Finally, after developing a formal model of conciliation under incomplete information, I select the case of the Telecom Package as analytic narrative to explain how Parliament may extract more concessions from the member states if it manipulates the Council's believe on its own type.

INDIVIDUAL DECISIONS ARE TAKEN BY EACH INDIVIDUAL FOR HIMSELF (regardless of whether he is inner- or other-directed). Group decisions imply that decisions are taken by a 'concrete' group, i.e. a face-to-face interacting number of individuals which may thus be said to share (partake) such decisions. Collective decisions are hardly amenable to a precise definition; but they are generally understood to mean decisions taken by the 'many'. We then havecollectivized decisions. Collective and collectivized decisions may be said to share the property of not being, in any meaningful sense, individual decisions. Even so, collectivized decisions are very different from all the others. Individual, group, and collective decisions all make reference to an actor, to who makes the decision. Collectivized decisions are, instead, decisions that apply to, and are enforced upon, a collectivity regardless of whether they are taken by the one, the few, or the many. The defining criterion no longer iswhomakes the decision, but itsscope: whoever does the decidingdecides or all.

peer-reviewed ; This research is about the Committee of the Regions advisory role and the influence of its Opinion in the EU's decision-making process, particularly in the co-decision procedure. For this purpose, this study attempts to answer two research questions. The first one refers to the potential of the CoR to influence the legislative institutions considering its position in the EU's interinstitutional framework. In this part, what is of interest is the development of the CoR's formal and informal relations with the EU's institutions and the implications for its advisory role. The second research question refers to how and under which conditions the CoR influences the outcome of the co-decision procedure. To answer this part of the research a quantitative analysis is provided as an attempt to measure the impact of the amendments proposed by the CoR in its Opinions under co-decision and to examine possible explanations for its varying degree of influence. The results of this research show, that the CoR holds an important position within the EU's institutional setting. The CoR exploits this position by developing strong relations especially with the Commission and the European Parliament. The relationship of the CoR with the Commission has been formalised since the mid-1990s in the adoption of cooperation agreements. In these cooperation agreements, the Commission provides for more avenues for the CoR to participate in the decision-making process by requesting for its Opinion in instances where it is not required by the Treaty. Likewise, since 2014 the EP has formalised its relationship with the CoR with their own cooperation agreement with the CoR. The outcome of the quantitative analysis confirms, that the CoR has limited influence through its formal Opinion under co-decision. However, the CoR's advisory role should not be neglected completely, as the explanatory analysis shows that the CoR can influence the co-decision procedure when it issues its Opinion early in the decision-making process and in ...

Each of us makes a number of decisions, from the less important to those with
far-reaching consequences. As members of different groups, we are also actors
of group decision making. In order to make a rational decision, a
choice-making procedure must satisfy a number of assumptions (conditions) of
rationality. In addition, when it comes to group decisions, those procedures
should also be ?fair.? However, it is not possible to define a procedure of
choice-making that would transform individual orders of alternatives based on
preferences of perfectly rational individuals into a single social order and
still meet conditions of rationality and ethics. The theory of deliberative
democracy appeared in response to the impossibility of Social Choice theory.
The basic assumption of deliberative democracy is that individuals adjust
their preferences taking into account interests of the community. They are
open for discussion with other group members and are willing to change their
attitudes in order to achieve common interests. Ideally, group members come
to an agreement during public discussion (deliberation). Still, this concept
cannot completely over?come all the difficulties posed by the theory of
social choice. Specifically, there is no solution for strategic and
manipulative behavior of individuals. Also, the concept of deliberative
democracy faces certain problems particular to this approach, such as, to
name but a few, problems with the establishment of equality of participants
in the debate and their motivation, as well as problems with the organization
of public hearings.