Direct or representative democracy? Co-Voting!

We analyze a new constitutional decision-making rule—called ”Co-Voting”—which is a convex combination of representative democracy and direct democracy. We consider a simple model in which the electorate is partially uninformed about policy and parliament members have biased preferences. Taking a constitutional perspective, we show that Co-Voting can be generically preferable for the citizenry to both direct and representative democracy—which are natural benchmarks—since it can either (i) enable socially desirable policies that direct democracy fails to select due to informational constraints, leveraging parliamentary bias in favor of those policies, and/or (ii) disallow socially undesirable policies that direct democracy selects due to informational constraints, leveraging parliamentary bias against those policies. Co-Voting retains desirable properties even under strategic proposal-making by parliament.