Institutional Effects on Committee Behavior: Or, You Can't Stop to Smell the Roses When Playing a 5-Person Game

Abstract

"Combining philosophy with empirical analysis is generally a dangerous thing to undertake. Something will always be lost in the translation. Nonetheless, in most instances such an endeavor is warranted. This paper provides a brief overview of a central concern in the debate between proponents of classical democratic theory and empirical democratic thought. This concern reduces to whether the contextual elements of a polity (more specifically the institutional structure) have a significant effect on democratic practice. The empirical work in this paper attempts to show that changes in the structure of a 'democratic' decision-making arrangement can affect the outcomes for that arrangement. Further, it is possible to model such an institution and subsequently to predict certain classes of outcomes."