Consistent representative democracy

We study axioms which define “representative democracy” in an environment in which agents vote over a finite set of alternatives. We focus on a property that states that whether votes are aggregated directly or indirectly makes no difference. We call this property representative consistency. Representative consistency can also be understood as a “gerrymandering-proofness” requirement for voting rules. We characterize the class of rules satisfying unanimity, anonymity, and representative consistency. We call these rules “partial priority rules.” A partial priority rule can be interpreted as a rule in which each agent can “veto” certain alternatives. We investigate the implications of imposing other axioms to the list specified above. We also study the partial priority rules in the context of specific economic models. ∗Assistant Professor of Economics, Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 228-77, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125. Email: [email protected] Phone: (626) 395-3559. This paper was formerly titled “On representative democracy.” I would like to thank John Duggan, Larry Epstein, Biung-Ghi Ju, Roger Lagunoff, Leonardo Martinez, Josef Perktold, Francesco Squintani, William Thomson, and Chun-Hsien Yeh, seminar participants at Caltech and participants at the 2002 Winter Midwest Economic Theory Meetings for helpful comments and discussions. JEL Classification: D63, D70.