Self Enforcing Voting in International Organizations / Giovanni Maggi, Massimo Morelli.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maggi, Giovanni.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Morelli, Massimo.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w10102.

NBER working paper series no. w10102

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2003.

Summary:

Some international organizations are governed by unanimity rule, some others by a majority system. Still others have moved from one system to the other over time. The existing voting models, which generally assume that decisions made by voting are perfectly enforceable, have a difficult time explaining the observed variation in governance mode, and in particular the widespread occurrence of the unanimity system. We present a model whose main departure from standard voting models is that there is no external enforcement mechanism: each country is sovereign and cannot be forced to follow the collective decision, or in other words, the voting system must be self-enforcing. The model yields unanimity as the optimal system for a wide range of parameters, and delivers rich predictions on the variation in the mode of governance, both across organizations and over time.

Notes:

Print version record

November 2003.