On the Strategic Use of Representative Democracy in International Agreements

We consider as endogenous the choice of the delegation rule in an international agreement between two countries. We study three potential types of delegation: strong, weak or no delegation, the latter case corresponding to direct democracy. We show that populations decide to bind themselves by deleg...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of public economic theory 2009-04, Vol.11 (2), p.281-296
Main Author: GRAZIOSI, GRÉGOIRE ROTA
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agreements
Decision making
Delegation of authority
Democracy
Direct democracy
Economic models
Economic statistics
Economic theory
Economics and Finance
Externality
Humanities and Social Sciences
International agreements
International relations
Pareto optimum
Referendums
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We consider as endogenous the choice of the delegation rule in an international agreement between two countries. We study three potential types of delegation: strong, weak or no delegation, the latter case corresponding to direct democracy. We show that populations decide to bind themselves by delegating the national policy decision‐making to a “powerful conservative representative,” in order to improve their bargaining position. These noncooperative behaviors of countries when they decide on their delegation rule induce negative political externalities between countries, which cancel the gains achieved by the internalization of economic externalities in the case of political integration. We then examine the consequences of ratification by referendum. We conclude that a Pareto improvement of the international agreement would be to incorporate an ex post referendum.
ISSN:1097-3923
1467-9779
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-9779.2009.01410.x