What are the best quorum rules? A laboratory investigation
What are the best quorum rules? A laboratory investigation
复制标题
最好的法定人数规则是什么?
DOI:
10.1007/s11127-019-00749-6
复制
发表时间:
2019
期刊:
影响因子:
1.6
通讯作者:
C. Vanberg
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Luís Aguiar‐Conraria;Pedro C. Magalhães;C. Vanberg
Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device added most commonly to majority rule in national referendums is a quorum requirement. The two most common are participation and approval quorums. Such rules are responses to three major concerns: the legitimacy of the referendum outcome, its representativeness, and protection of minorities regarding issues that should demand a broad consensus. Guided by a pivotal voter model, we conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the performances of different quorums in attaining such goals. We introduce two main innovations in relation to previous work on the topic. First, part of the electorate goes to the polls out of a sense of civic duty. Second, we test the performances of a different quorum, the rejection quorum, recently proposed in the literature. We conclude that, depending on the preferred criterion, either the approval or the rejection quorum is the best.