IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/21026.html

Propose or Vote: A Canonical Democratic Procedure

Author

Listed:
  • Gersbach, Hans

Abstract

This paper introduces Propose or Vote (PoV), a democratic procedure for collective decision-making and elections that does not rely on a central mechanism designer. In the first stage, members of a polity choose whether to become proposal-makers or to participate only as voters. In the second stage, voters decide by majority voting over the set of submitted proposals. With appropriately chosen default points, PoV implements the Condorcet winner in a single round of voting whenever one exists. We show that this implementation is globally unique when the number of members is odd; for an even number of members, uniqueness can be restored by adding an artificial agent. PoV can also be applied to elections, where agents decide whether to stand as candidates or vote over the resulting candidate set.

Suggested Citation

  • Gersbach, Hans, 2026. "Propose or Vote: A Canonical Democratic Procedure," CEPR Discussion Papers 21026, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21026
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP21026
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games
    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General
    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:21026. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.