Ideology and Endogenous Constitutions

University of Montreal and Alessandro Riboni

No 988, 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: A legislature has to reach a collective decision in either of two states of nature. In the first state, legislators vote over an ideological issue. In this state, legislators may not vote for the pragmatic (optimal) policy and, instead, confirm voters' ideological bias. In the second state, the legislature handles an issue that is not ideologically charged. We find the optimal majority rule under the veil of ignorance. The chosen majority rule affects (i) the nature and quality of policy reforms, (ii) the probability that changes are made (iii) the incentives of legislators with ideological constituencies to become agenda setter. We find that in some cases the optimal majority rule is hump-shaped with respect to ideological polarization. Finally, we test some of our theoretical predictions.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2009/paper_988.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed009:988

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().