Accidental politicians: How randomly selected legislators can improve parliament efficiency

Authored by Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo, Salvatore Spagano, Maurizio Caserta

Date Published: 2011-10-15

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2011.06.028

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

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Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an “efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Tags

Agent based models Complex systems sociophysics