The Delegation Perspective on Representative Democracy

Arbeitspapier

Why do political constituencies delegate decision power to representative assemblies? And how is the size of such assemblies determined? We analyze these questions of constitutional design in a model with voters learning their preferred alternative only after engaging in costly information gathering. We show that there is an optimal assembly size that would be chosen at a constitutional stage. This implies a relationship between assembly and constituency size. We then compared this relationship to actual data. Fitting a single parameter to the data, we show that our model can explain the actual relationship between assembly and constituency size quite well.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Bonn Econ Discussion Papers ; No. 17/2002

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior ; Capitalist Systems: Political Economy ; Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
• Subject: Constitutional Design ; Representative Democracy ; Parliament Size ; Information Costs ; Demokratie ; Parlament ; Verfassungsökonomik ; Informationskosten ; Schätzung ; Theorie ; EU-Staaten ; Deutschland ; Schweiz

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Hain, Roland ; Mitra, Manipushpak
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Bonn, Bonn Graduate School of Economics (BGSE)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2002

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/22827
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET