Chapter 1 of the thesis examines a question of how a voting process can be designed to induce rational individuals to display reciprocal and pro-social behaviors. A political procedure, namely, the reciprocity mechanism, is proposed to address this issue. The analysis displays that this new mechanism is a modification of the legislative process encountered in democratic countries. The results indicate that, under natural assumptions on voters' preferences, a stable policy always exists, and it may be unique if preferences are single-peaked. Moreover, any stable policy is Pareto-efficient.
It has been argued that the size of the supermajority needed to enact a policy in a decision-making body should depend on the importance of this policy. However, a formal analysis of the relationship between policy importance and the voting rule is still lacking in the literature. Chapter 2 addresses this gap from the perspective of a preference-blind political designer. Given the level of importance of a policy, the goal is to choose the supermajority rule that guarantees the existence of a stable policy regardless of the extent to which individual political opinions are antagonistic, ensures that all stable policies are efficient, and minimizes status quo bias. Chapter 2 solves this problem. A closed-form relationship between supermajority rule and policy importance is derived. The analysis has practical implications for the optimal design and functioning of political institutions.
The majority rule is widely used to select policies in political institutions. Chapter 3 proves that this rule is not optimal for sufficiently complex policies. To address this issue, natural preference domains are identified for which the majority rule is optimal under a simple sequential procedure. Under this procedure, the majority rule guarantees the existence of a stable policy, ensures that all stable policies are efficient, and minimizes the status quo bias, no matter the complexity of the policy space. The results imply that this voting rule is not appropriate for certain types of societies, including sufficiently fractionalized societies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/37364 |
| Date | 04 April 2018 |
| Creators | Tondji, Jean Baptiste |
| Contributors | Pongou, Roland |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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