Balancing the Power to Appoint Officers

• Authors: Salvador Barberà.
• BSE Working Paper: 110179 | September 15
• Keywords: voting rules , constitutional design , Strong Nash equilibrium , rule of k names
• JEL codes: D02, D71, D72
• voting rules
• constitutional design
• Strong Nash equilibrium
• rule of k names

Rules of k names are frequently used methods to appoint individuals to office. They are two-stage procedures where a …first set of agents, the proposers, select k individuals from an initial set of candidates, and then another agent, the chooser, appoints one among those k in the list. In practice, the list of k names is often arrived at by letting each of the proposers screen the proposed candidates by voting for v of them and then choose those k with the highest support. We then speak of v-rules of k names. Our main purpose in this paper is to study how different choices of the parameters v and k affect the balance of power between the proposers and the choosers. From a positive point of view, we analyze a strategic game where the proposers interact to determine what list of candidates to submit. From a normative point of view, we study the impact of the choice of parameters v and k upon the distribution of power among the proposers and the chooser, and we discuss how to eventually balance it.