Representative democracy and the implementation of majority-preferred alternatives

In this paper, we study representative democracy, one of the most popular classes of collective decision-making mechanisms, and contrast it with direct democracy. In a direct democracy, individuals have the opportunity to vote over the alternatives in every choice problem the population faces. In a representative democracy, the population commits to a candidate ex ante who will then make choices on its behalf. While direct democracy is normatively appealing, representative democracy is the far more common institution because of its practical advantages. The key question, then, is whether representative democracy succeeds in implementing the choices that the group would make under direct democracy. We find that, in general, it does not. We analyze the theoretical setting in which the two methods are most likely to lead to the same choices, minimizing potential sources of distortion. We model a population as a distribution of voters with strict preferences over a finite set of alternatives and a candidate as an ordering of those alternatives that serves as a binding, contingent plan of action. We focus on the case where the direct democracy choices of the population are consistent with an ordering of the alternatives. We show that even in this case, where the normative recommendation of direct democracy is clear, representative democracy may not elect the candidate with this ordering. ∗A special thank you to Jerry Green for many helpful conversations about this work. This author also gratefully acknowledges the comments and suggestions of Steven Brams, Lucas Coffman, Drew Fudenberg, Yuichiro Kamada, Klaus Nehring, Alvin Roth, Kenneth Shepsle, Tomasz Strzalecki, William Zwicker, seminar participants at Harvard University, and conference participants at the New York University Graduate Student Political Economy Conference, EconCon 2011, and the Judgment Aggregation and Voting Theory Workshop.