Getting to the Core: The Effect of Bicameralism and the Committee System on Coalition Formation

民主理论要求，从一组可供选择的方案中，由多数决定原则选出的结果，应以某种有意义的方式反映选民的偏好。当一个结果被认为是“多数统治的赢家”时，任何多数联盟都不应该能够想象出一个所有联盟成员都喜欢的不同结果。程序规则应该是中立的便利，使投票机构能够有效和轻松地确定多数规则赢家。不幸的是，这些令人满意的主张在多数决定原则投票中都不成立。当选民有强烈的意见分歧时，可能就没有一种选择能以任何有意义的方式反映“人民的意愿”。对于任何可能的选择，总会有一些多数联盟倾向于不同的选择。如果这是真的，不同的程序规则可能会导致完全不同的结果，仅仅是为了保护有利的结果不受倾向于不同选择的多数联盟的影响。令人不安的是，任何可能的民主程序都可能在某种意义上以武断和“独立”于选民偏好的方式决定结果。但如果是这样的话，理解替代性程序规则对民主决策的影响是很重要的。拟议的研究进行了受控的实验室实验，在实验中，受试者的报酬随从二维网格中选择的备选方案而变化。被调查者对备选方案的偏好各不相同，但从一个投票机构到另一个投票机构，这些偏好是不变的。但是，不同的投票机构可以使用完全不同的程序规则对备选方案进行投票。例如，不同的规则决定了引入备选方案以供审议和投票的程序。如果规则只是投票机构方便地得出不变结果的中立手段，那么所选择的结果就不应该在不同的实验中有所不同。然而，早期的实验清楚地表明，即使选民的偏好保持不变，不同的规则也会系统性地导致截然不同的结果。不同的理论对在不同规则下选择的结果作出了截然不同的预测；通过充分的实验，应该有可能大大增加我们对游戏规则对民主选择的影响的理解。

The theory of democracy requires that the outcome chosen by majority rule from among the set of available alternatives should reflect the preferences of the voters in some meaningful way. When an outcome is said to be a "majority rule winner", no majority coalition should be able to imagine a different outcome that all coalition members would prefer. Procedural rules should simply be neutral conveniences enabling a voting body to determine the majority rule winner efficiently and easily. Unfortunately, none of these desirable propositions is true in general for majority rule voting. When voters have strong differences of opinion, then there may be no single alternative that can be chosen that reflects the "will of the people" in any meaningful way. For any possible selection, there will always be some majority coalition that would prefer a different choice. When this is true, different procedural rules may lead to quite different outcomes simply by protecting favored outcomes from a majority coalition that would prefer a different choice. It is troubling to realize that any possible democratic procedure could determine the outcome in a way that is in some sense arbitrary and "independent" of the preferences of the voters. But if so, it is important to understand the effects of alternative procedural rules on democratic decisions. The proposed research conducts controlled laboratory experiments in which subjects are paid amounts that vary with the alternative selected from a two-dimensional grid. Subjects have quite different preferences over the alternatives to be selected, but the preferences are held constant from one voting body to another. But different voting bodies are allowed to vote over the alternatives using quite different procedural rules. Different rules determine, for example, the procedure by which alternatives are introduced for consideration and balloting. If rules are simply neutral means by which voting bodies conveniently arrive at invariant outcomes, then the outcomes chosen should not differ from one experiment to another. However, early experiments indicate clearly that different rules lead systematically to quite different outcomes, even though the preferences of the voters are held constant. Different theories make quite different predicitions about the outcomes to be selected under different rules; with sufficient experimentation, it should be possible greatly to increase our understanding of the effects of the rules of the game on democratic choice.