We examine democratic policy-making in a simple institution with real-time agenda setting. Individuals are recognized sequentially. Once recognized, an individual makes a proposal, which is immediately put to a vote. If a proposal passes, it supercedes all previously passed proposals. The policy that emerges from this process is implemented. For some familiar classes of policy spaces with rich distributional politics, we show that the last proposer is effectively a dictator under a variety of natural conditions. Most notably, this occurs whenever a sufficient number of individuals have opportunities to make proposals. Thus, under reasonably general assumptions, control of the final proposal with real-time agenda setting confers as much power as control of the entire agenda.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
8973.
Length: Date of creation: May 2002 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8973
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D7 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making H0 - Public Economics - - General
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Jackson, Matthew O. & Dutta, Bhaskar & Le Breton, Michele, 2002.
"Equilibrium Agenda Formation,"
Working Papers
1152, California Institute of Technology, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
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