Decision-Making in Committees

Game-Theoretic Analysis

Author: Nicola Friederike Maaser

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Book Series : Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

About this book

Political and economic institutions are typically governed by committees that face the challenge to reconcile the preferences of their members. How should decision rules be designed to generate fair and sustainable agreements, for example if committee members represent groups of different sizes? This book uses game-theoretic concepts and models to address the issue of political decision-making processes. In addition to providing a survey on basic game-theoretic tools in the analysis of political decisions, the author looks at specific issues such as two-tiered voting systems or the influence of lobbyists on legislative committees, and shows how the models can be applied to real-world contexts such as the EU decision-making institutions.

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Games and Political Decisions

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to some fundamental aspects of decision-making in committees. ‘Committee’ is used to refer to a decision-making body that comprises a small number of members (as opposed to a referendum situation), and chooses from a set of well-defined policy alternatives (in contrast to the electorate in a general election which usually chooses between candidates or party platforms). Decisions are ultimately reached by putting alternatives to a vote according to some voting rule specifying which subsets of all committee members can pass a proposal. This notion of a committee differs from everyday language where the term also applies to expert panels with advisory function, or organizational subunits that make recommendations or submit proposals to some superordinate organization.

Nicola F. Maaser

Chapter 2. Committees as Representative Institutions

Abstract

A voting game can be looked at from the angle of the individual players, or from that of the designer of the voting game. In the former perspective, it is natural to ask what the ‘value’ of the game to each of the players is. As stressed in Sects. 1.2 and 1.3, ‘value’ can refer to a player’s ability to change the outcome of a voting game, or to the payoffs he may reasonably expect, but in both cases the game enters the analysis as input. From the designer’s perspective, by contrast, the input is a desired value for the individual players, and the problem is to construct a voting game which induces it. This idea, that human interaction can be subjected to deliberate design, possibly most warrants the label ‘political’. Assessing the rules of existing political bodies and devising new rules is the foremost area of application for power indices (see Sect. 1.2.1).

This chapter is devoted to one instance of such an institutional design problem: finding a weighted voting rule which implements the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ in a two-tiered government system. Weighted voting is used in many important political bodies such as the EU Council of Ministers, the US Electoral College, and the International Monetary Fund, as well as in some cartels, such as the International Coffee Council. The choice of weights is often a source of considerable dissent in these bodies. With respect to the European Union, the Single European Act of 1986 comprised provisions that weighted voting under a qualified majority rule should be applied for most decisions in the Council of Ministers concerning the Single Market. Like the earlier Treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, the Treaty of Nice, which was settled by the governments of the EU member states in December 2000, extended the use of qualified majority rule to new policy domains. Here, as well as at earlier occasions, e.g., the 1995 enlargement to Austria, Finland, and Sweden, the voting weights and quota proved to be a bone of contention. The controversy regained its momentum at the Council of the European Union (the ‘EU Summit’) in June 2007 due to Poland’s lobbying for a square-root allocation of weights in the Council of Ministers.

Nicola F. Maaser

Chapter 3. Robust Equal Representation

Abstract

This chapter investigates the robustness of square root rules for equal representation in two-tiered voting systems. When policy alternatives are non-binary and decisions are made by simple majority rule, Chap. 2 demonstrated that weight proportional to the square root of population size is approximately optimal, which may be interpreted as extending the scope of Penrose’s square root rule beyond the narrow limits of binary decision-making. However, in light of the normative character of this result, the simplifications used in the modeling of a complex real situation, such as, e.g., decision-making in the EU Council of Ministers, require special scrutiny.

Specifically, the aim of this chapter is to conduct a ‘sensitivity analysis’ regarding the square root rule, addressing the following questions How does a ‘simple’ voting rule that derives directly from constituency sizes perform compared to more sophisticated rules that use standard power indices as reference points? What is the fair voting rule under supermajority rules at the top tier? How does the fair voting rule react to heterogeneity across constituencies?

Nicola F. Maaser

Chapter 4. Committees and Lobby Coalition Formation

Abstract

This chapter finally descends from the heights of constitutional design to the domain of ‘ordinary’ politics: It analyzes a situation where lobbyists seek to influence decision-making in a legislature (or legislative committee) by offering payments to its members. While Chap. 1 has asked “who gets what” with respect to committee members themselves, Chaps. 2 and 3 have studied individual citizens’ ‘derivative’ influence on decisions in a committee of representatives. The present chapter considers the question how much clout lobbyists have with a legislative committee.

Lobbyists are assumed to share common interests with respect to the political outcome, whereby lobbying efforts become a public good for them, and incentives to free-ride arise. Each lobbyist prefers someone else to contribute so that he may enjoy the benefits from a more favorable political decision without incurring the costs of bringing it about. Although increasing returns to sharing these costs exist, which would imply the formation of a ‘grand coalition’ of lobbyists, “The Logic of Collective Action” (Olson, 1965) suggests that, in the absence of enforceable agreements, (rational) individual lobbyists cannot be expected to act on group interest, that is, to provide an efficient level of lobbying efforts. At the same time, in the real world, lobbyists often seem able to organize themselves in order to obtain changes in legislation or regulation.

Nicola F. Maaser

Backmatter

Title: Decision-Making in Committees
Author: Nicola Friederike Maaser
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-642-04153-2
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04152-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04153-2

Springer Professional

About this book

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Games and Political Decisions

Chapter 2. Committees as Representative Institutions

Chapter 3. Robust Equal Representation

Chapter 4. Committees and Lobby Coalition Formation

Backmatter