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.
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Paper provided by University of Bonn, Germany in its series Bonn Econ Discussion Papers with number
bgse17_2002.
Length: 34 Date of creation: Jul 2002 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:bon:bonedp:bgse17_2002
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information P16 - Economic Systems - - Capitalist Systems - - - Political Economy of Capitalism
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