An Experimental Study of the Effects of Procedural Rules on Committee Behavior

This essay examines experimentally the decisions of five-member committees under conditions designed to assess the extent to which parliamentary procedures induce majority rule equilibria. Using a two-dimensional issue space, our committees employ an especially simplified version of parliamentary voting which requires voting on one issue at a time. Theoretically, this induces a stable equilibrium at the issue-by-issue median preference and precludes the instabilities associated with unconstrained majority rule. By varying the ease with which subjects can communicate and thereby circumvent this procedure, we gain insight into the way in which people might circumvent political institutions that otherwise induce equilibria or that are designed to bias outcomes away from results that might prevail in an unconstrained context.