Can Democratic Innovations Improve the Performance

of Representative Governments? An Agent Based Model

Approach
Vicente Ros, Vctor Garca

August 30, 2015

Abstract

In this study we investigate emergent legislative dynamics in a variety of political systems by

means of Monte Carlo simulations of agent based models. We find that Representative Government
systems solely organized around political parties generate higher social welfare in scenarios of simple majorities than in the case of absolute majorities. We also explore the behavior of Participatory
Democracy systems that combine political parties and direct citizen participation in the legislative
process. At this regard, we find that Participatory Democracy systems outperform Representative
Government systems in terms of legislative quality and deliver lower volatility. A remarkable feature
of Participatory Democracy systems is that they display an inverted U-shaped pattern between the
power share of citizens in the parliament and the social gains generated by the legislative process.
Finally, we explore the performance of a bicameral setting, the Citizen Senate, where citizens are
allocated in the second political chamber and have the ability to veto proposals stemming from
the political chamber conformed by political parties. In order to compare and evaluate the performance of the various political systems we take into account different attitudes towards political
uncertainty by integrating the results obtained within a representative agent utility analysis. We
find that risk averse profiles will penalize severely the instability of legislative outcomes associated
to Representative Government systems.

Keywords: Agent based models, Democracy, Participation, Representative Government.

Introduction
In a recent study analyzing social protests occurring over the period ranging from 2006 to 2013 in 87

countries covering 90% of world population, Ortiz et al. (2013) show that one of the main grievances
and causes of outrage is the failure of political representation of the current political systems. Their
most relevant finding is the overwhelming demand for a real democracy. Moreover, they find that
the crisis of political representation affects not only authoritarian governments but also representative
regimes of developed countries. In this context, we find that it is especially relevant to analyze the
performance of alternative political systems that may involve actively citizens in the decision making
process. To that end, we use agent based modeling techniques to simulate and approximate the
functioning of various prototypical political systems.
According to classical political theory, there are two main parameters that allow the characterization
of any political system. The first one is the degree of distribution or concentration of political power
among the agents populating the political system. Along this dimension, Aristotle (350 B.C) developed
a first taxonomy of political models taking into account its pure and degenerated form. Monarchies
and tyrannies are characterized as political systems in which political power achieves its maximum
concentration level since it is vested in a single individual. With a lesser degree of concentration,
aristocracies and oligarchies are political systems where power is in the hands of a few. On the contrary,
democracies and oclocracies describe political systems characterized by egalitarian distributions of
political power among agents. The second key parameter is the selection mechanism of legislators.
At this regard, Montesquieu (1748) and Aristotle (350 B.C) among others, argued that lotteries
were typical of democracies while election by suffrage was typical of oligarchies or aristocracies. In a
detailed historical review Manin (1997) shows that the three main mechanisms to select representatives
define prototypical political regimes in a historical context. Blood heritage is the mechanism typically
associated to Monarchies, elections are related to oligarchic Representative Governments (RG) and
lotteries are associated to Democracies (D).

Political Regime
Autocracy
Oligarchy
Demarchy

Table 1: Political Regimes and Selection Mechanisms

Procedure
Historical Application
Blood Heritage
European Absolute Monarchies, 15th to 19th century A.C
Elections, suffrage
Representative Governments, 19th to 21st century A.C
Lotteries
Athenian Democracy, 5th and 4th centuries B.C

Therefore, RG1 regimes where political power is concentrated in few professional politicians selected
1
The characteristics that define RG systems are four:i) the governors are elected by the governed at regular intervals
by means of suffrage, ii)rulers organized in political parties preserve independence from the governed in a range of

by suffrage and organized around parties contrast markedly with democracies, characterized by egalitarian distributions of political power and by the fact that their legislators were selected by lotteries
on a set of citizen volunteers, as it was the case of the Athens of centuries V and IV BC (Chouard
2011; Dupuis-Deri 2004). Hansen (1991) explains that the word democracy is mentioned for the first
time in Herodotus (484-425 BC) and that it emerged to designate a sophisticated system of political
power sharing that involved a comprehensive use of citizens to formulate policy and choose leaders. A
thorough institutional analysis of the Athenian Democracy (AD) shows that the assignation of charges
combined lot and suffrage (Hansen 1991; Manin 1997). However, while a small number of political
positions associated with certain technical skills were chosen by suffrage, a distinct feature of the Athenian regime was that the majority of positions in the judicial, executive and legislative power were
selected by lot and rotated at a high frequency in order to avoid political oligarchization. Importantly,
even if AD is well known by the fact that legislation had to be approved in the popular assembly,
quantitatively speaking , the key institution in the legislative process was the council whose members
were selected by lot.2 In this study we implement a characterization of the various political systems
according to the mechanism to select legislators following Manin (1997). However, we acknowledge
that the mechanism used to select the legislator, by itself, may not entirely define the nature of the
political system given as there are additional elements of great influence in the characterization of any
political system (McCormick 2006; Sintomer 2010).3
Recently, some applications of agent-based modeling in political science have been used for the
discovery of new relationships and principles. Laver and Sergenti (2012) analyze party competition
dynamics while Pluchino et al. (2011) explore whether the legislative effect caused by introducing
random legislators within a two-party Parliament may counteract the effect caused by party discipline.
Nevertheless, in the field of political system modeling there are still many open questions. What
political systems generate socially desirable legislations? Could democratic innovations including
citizens in decision-making process improve the social performance of RGs? We investigate these
issues by means of Monte Carlo simulations of agent based models that emulate the functioning and
structure of different political systems. At the computational level, political systems are modeled as
systems of agents interacting with each other, proposing and voting laws according to pre-specified
behavioral rules, with a specific distribution of power among themselves and a spatial location in the
Cipolla Diagram (1976) which reflects a specific selection mechanism. In this study we build on the
initiatives, iii) public opinions on political issues can be expressed beyond the control of the rulers and iv) the collective
decision is taken by the rulers at the end of the discussion (Manin, 1997)
2
As Hansen (1991) estimated, more than half of the laws passed by the assembly were proposed by the council.
3
Political scientists have argued that there are other relevant features in systemic classification such as: i) the universe
of population on which the selection mechanism is applied, ii) the rotation frequency of the legislators and iii) the degree
of control over the legislative flow and the political charges.

framework developed by Pluchino et al. (2011). However, a variety of new innovative and relevant
features are introduced in the model. These extensions are relevant for several reasons.
The first relevant change is that we include a third political-party in order to approximate RG
dynamics. The modeling of multi-party systems allows us to analyze simple majority RG legislatures
in a stylized manner without introducing randomly selected citizen legislators. Thus, our modeling
approach departs from the model developed by Pluchino et al. (2011) where there are only two
political parties and by construction, one of the two will be governing with absolute majority. This
is not a minor issue given that in their study, legislative quality improvements are solely attributed
to the inclusion of randomly selected citizens while the positive effect they observe is due to the
transition from an absolute majority regime to a simple majority one. Moreover, by extending the
number of parties we can analyze RG outcomes with a higher degree of realism, as political power is
usually distributed among more than two parties and the scenario of absolute majority is not frequent
(Diermeier and Merlo, 2000).
The second significant change is that we depart from the unrealistic assumption of a fixed and
uniform number of proposals for each legislature with independence of the Parliament composition.
In order to approximate the behavior of Participatory Democracies (PD), that integrate legislative
proposals from political parties and citizens4 , we assume the number of proposals is variable and
dependent on the number of parties and citizen legislators participating in the policy-making process.
Hong and Page (2001; 2004) analyze how artificial agents solve problems and explore the returns
to additional problem solvers, finding that groups of problem solvers can exhibit arbitrary marginal
returns to additional members. The change implied by the integration of citizens in the legislative
process generates two opposing effects that need to be explored. On one hand, an increase in the
number of proposals will rise the potential social gains by augmenting the number of candidate laws
to be approved in the voting phase. On the contrary, the increasing number of participating citizens
will fragment the parliament making more difficult to get the needed majority to pass acts which may
freeze and decrease legislative output.
A third novelty of the present analysis is that when analyzing PD systems, we do not restrict the
analysis to unicameral parliamentary configurations but we also consider a bicameral system labeled
the Citizen Senate (CS) that closely follows the proposal of Zakaras (2010). This form of political
organization combines lot and elections as main procedures to select and assign representatives to each
4

In the PD system considered here, the representative component is articulated through the vote applied to party
agents and direct participation is articulated through lotteries applied to select citizens who directly participate in
legislative work.

chamber. A fundamental difference with respect classical bicameralism of Madison (1788), is that in
the CS, control and supervision is directly undertaken by citizens and not by any other political party
members. The main difference with respect the unicameral PD model is that citizens do not launch
legislative proposals but preserve the ability to veto legislation that comes from the camera of political
parties. Within this framework, we analyze the optimal consensus level for applying a veto to laws
passed by political parties.
A final difference with respect previous work is that we do not only consider the average quality
of the political system but also the average legislative volatility. Authors such as Landemore (2012a,
2012b) or Ober (2010) have pointed out the fact that the use of lotteries to select legislators may
increase the diversity of agents and the appearance of negative correlations in their skills. Likewise,
Page (2007) shows that negative correlations between the skills of the various agents will produce
a cognitive diversification. In this context, political diversification may help to reduce the risk of
the political system. This issue is relevant as different political systems will differ in the amount of
uncertainty. Additionally, different risk attitudes may generate different evaluations of such outcomes.
We compute metrics of legislative volatility and compare the performance of each of these political
systems within a mean standard deviation utility framework (Meyer 1987; Saha 1997).
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the agent based model methodology used
to carry out the simulation exercises of the political systems. Section 3 presents the hypothesis and
results of each of the computational experiments that characterize each of the political systems under
consideration. Section 4 compares the different models within a unifying utility analysis that takes into
account risk attitudes. Section 5 offers the main conclusions from our work and possible extensions
to it.

The Agent Based Model

In this section we describe the agent-based modeling approach undertaken to simulate the different

political systems under consideration. The model parliament consists of legislators l(x,y) defined by
a pair of coordinates associated to a concrete position in a Cipolla diagram. The Cipolla diagram
represents the nature of legislators according to their ability to promote personal or social interest
and it is the theoretical device used to elaborate the computational agent based model. The pair
of coordinates (x,y) captures the attitude to promote personal and general interest. Therefore, each
legislator has the possibility to propose laws that can result into a i) benefit/damage for himself or
ii) benefit/damage for others. We normalize the values so that the effect of the legislators initiatives
oscillate between -1 (highly damaging) and +1 (highly beneficial) for each of the axis, x and y. Given
the heterogeneity of legislators and the possibility of different capabilities to promote either private
or social gains, there are four prototypes of legislators based on their proposals: intelligent legislators
will benefit themselves and the others (+,+), altruistic legislators (-,+) will benefit the others but not
themselves, selfish legislators will benefit themselves and damage others (+,-) and stupid legislators
will damage themselves and other citizens (-,-).
In the model, differences characterizing the theoretical political systems outlined above, emerge
due to differences in the nature of legislators but also because of the method of selection of legislators.
The specificity of the legislator-selection mechanism is captured by the spatial distribution of agents
in the Cipolla Diagram. We assume that AD type of political systems organized through lotteries
will tend to scatter legislators across the Cipolla Diagram while RG systems where suffrage is applied
to select representatives of parties will form clusters of agents around certain coordinates. On the
other hand, PD hybrid systems are assumed to combine both type of agents and mechanisms. We
model randomly selected citizen-type legislators, denoted by li (x, y), as uniformly-distributed points
U [1, 1], in the Cipolla Diagram. On the other hand, legislators belonging to a political Party k, are
denoted by lk (x, y). The function used to generate the locations of the agents belonging to a party in
the Cipolla space is the Gaussian density function. In particular, all the points ljk (x, y) representing
members of a given party Pk will lie inside a circle with a given radius of tolerance rk with a center in
Pk (xc , yc ). The center of each Pk is fixed by the average collective behavior of all its members, while
the length of the radius indicates the extent to which the political party tolerates dissent within it
(i.e, the larger the radius the greater heterogeneity in the party).
Figures 1, 2 and 3 below display the spatial configuration in the Cipolla Diagram of the different
political systems under consideration. Figure 1 plots the Cipolla Diagram of a parliament that consists
6

only of partisan agents and approximates the behavior of the RG. Figure 2 plots the PD representation.
As it is observed, it includes both partisan agents and randomly selected citizen legislators in the
decision making process. Notice that this model nests the AD if we eliminate political parties from
the design. Finally, Figure 3 plots the CS, a bicameral parliamentary configuration that allocates all
professional politicians ljk in the first chamber and all citizens li in the second one.
Figure 1: Representative Government

The dynamics of the legislative process are the following. During a legislature L, each independent
legislator li (x, y) or belonging to a party ljk (x, y) can perform two actions: i proposing a law and ii)
voting for or against a proposal of law. Independent legislators and political parties have different
propositive capabilities and in this model we assume the number of proposals in a legislature L to be
dependent on the number of randomly selected politicians and the number of parties. Specifically, we
assume that each political party Pk , generates 100 law proposals per legislature (CPk = 100) while
in the baseline scenario individuals propose on average a single act per legislature (CPi = 1). The
proposal action does not depend on the membership of the agent so that each legislator generates an
act an , with n = 1, 2, ..Np , being Np the total number of acts proposed by all the legislators during the
legislature L, with a given personal and social gain such that: an (x, y) = l(x, y) for every act proposed.
It follows that legislators belonging to a party Pk can propose acts which are not perfectly in agreement

Figure 2: Participatory Democracy

Figure 3: Citizen Senate

with the Partys collective center Pk (xc , yc ) and some divergence within the correspondent circle of
tolerance is allowed. The total number of proposals Np , discussed in legislature L depends on the
systemic configuration such that:

Np (L) =

K
X

Pk CPk +

I
X

li CPi

(1)

i=1

k=1

where Pk refers to political party k, CPk denotes its propositive ability, li denotes independent legislator i and CPi the propositive ability of legislator i. On the other hand, the shares of political power
among political parties and independent citizens satisfies that:

W (L) = (1 c)

K
X
k=1

k + c

I
X

(2)

i=1

where W (L) = 1, c [0, 1] is the share of citizens in the distribution of political power, i is the
share of an individual and k is the share of the political party k. In the PD system, where parties
and citizens coexist, the power share of any political party k, will decrease as c increases. Notice that
if all the political power is in the hands of the citizens, political parties have no role and the system
converges to a prototypical model of Athenian Democracy. At this regard, we equalize the number
of proposals in the extreme RG and the AD model so that outputs of the two political systems are
comparable. However, we assume that in a PD system, the quantity of the proposals starts from the
initial RG level and then rises with the number of citizens. The increase will be more pronounced the
higher the propositive ability of citizens (CPi ). Thus, we allow for scenarios of highly participative
agents and scenarios of passive citizens.
The action of voting for or against a concrete proposal is more complex and strictly depends on
the membership of the voter and his/her acceptance window. The acceptance window is a rectangular
window on the Cipolla diagram into which a proposed act an (x, y) has to fall in order to be accepted
by the voter. Therefore, while each randomly selected legislator has his/her own acceptance window,
so that his/her vote is independent from the others vote, all legislators ljk (x, y) belonging to a party
Pk vote by using the same acceptance window, whose lower left corner corresponds to the center of
the circle of tolerance of the party Pk . However, following the party discipline, any member of a party
accepts all the proposals coming from any other member of the same party k. Notice that the fact
that a certain act an (x, y) would be favorable for a given legislator does not imply that it should be
favorable for another legislator or Party. Hence, the coordinate x (an ) of any act is different for any
legislator or Party and it will be expressed by a random number x , uniformly extracted in the interval
9

[-1,1]. This new position, x(an ) = (x , y), is called voting point and it will lie on the line y = y(an ).
The voting point has to be compared with the acceptance windows of legislators and Parties. It follows
that from the personal advantage point of view, the act can be either approved or rejected depending
on whether the voting point lies on the right or left of the acceptance window corner. A diagram of
the voting process and pseudo-code of legislative dynamic is shown in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4: Voting

Step 1: Proposal. Legislator ljk (x, y) belonging to Party k, proposes an act an (x, y). This proposal
generates the line y = y (an ). From this line, a new voting point an (x , y) [1, 1] is created for each
agent.
Step 2: Voting. The independent legislator li (x, y) who has an acceptance window defined by
wi (x, y) checks whether the specific an (x , y) falls inside wi (x, y). As it is the case in the example
given that the pair x , yn xi , yi , legislator li will vote favorably. The same proposal would be
positively voted by all the members ljk0 of the Party Pk0 since it also falls within the window wk0 (x, y).
Step 3: Acceptance or Rejection. Finally, once all the members of the Parliament voted for or
against a certain proposal, the latter will accepted only if it gets at least

N
2

+ 1 favorable votes. In

other case it is rejected.

Step 4: Go to step 1 and repeat s times the process for all legislators. This is necessary in order
10

to avoid spurious results given that there might be extreme cases where all legislators are virtuous or
stupid and we are interested in obtaining the metrics that characterize every political system regardless
of specific locations. Hence, legislative dynamics of each parliament are simulated through a Monte
Carlo exercise with s = 10000 repetitions of the process. The average quality of the legislature in each
political system is computed as:

Q=

S Nacc
1XX
y (am (s))
S

(3)

s=1 m=1

where S is the total number of Monte Carlo experiments and y (am ) is the social gain delivered by
the proposal m. Given a spatial configuration determining the quality of the set of proposals y (am ),
the key driver of the total legislative quality is the number of accepted proposals Nacc . Equation
(4) below implies that the number of approved proposals is a positive unknown function f of the
number of parties K, the number of citizens li and the concentration of power among political agents
. Importantly, is a negative unknown function of the number of independent citizens li .

Nacc = f (K+ , Ni (li,+ ) , (li, ))

(4)

Therefore, by differentiating with respect li we find that the net effect of increasing citizen participation
on the rate of accepted proposals depends on two forces moving in opposite directions such that:
Nacc
f K
f Ni
f
=
+
+
li
K li
Ni li
li

(5)

where the first term of the equation (5) is zero (as the number of parties does not depend on the
number of citizens), the second is positive and the third one is negative given that the derivative of
with respect li is negative. Therefore, the effect of increased participation in the phases of proposal
and voting cannot be determined a priori and needs to be simulated.
In order to assess political instability we compute the volatility of the legislative quality associated
to each parliamentary design. The volatility of a political system refers to the amount of uncertainty
or risk about the size of changes in legislative outcomes. A higher volatility means that outcomes
generated by the political system can be spread out over large range of values and that the system
performance may change dramatically over a short period of time. A lower volatility implies that
outcomes of the system do not fluctuate dramatically. The volatility metric is computed as the

11

standard deviation of the legislative quality over the s repetitions:

v
u
S
u1 X
t
V =
(y (s) Q)2
S

(6)

s=1

where Q denotes the average legislative quality over the s repetitions and ys refers to the quality of
the legislature in a given repetition s which is given by:

y (s) =

N
acc
X

y (am )

(7)

m=1

12

Experiments
In this section we explore the outcomes emerging from the different political systems.

3.1

Representative Government System

The average quality and political instability in RG systems, are functions of the number of parties
(and their proposals), the radius of tolerance, the distribution of power among parties and the spatial
location of the parties in the Cipolla Diagram. Therefore, in the analysis of the RG system we test the
performance of this political regime with respect the number of parties (bipartidist or multipartidist),
the distribution of power between the parties (concentrated or equi-distributed) and the degree of
party discipline (strong/weak).
Typically, two-party systems typify majoritarian electoral rules (i.e, the winner takes all) where the
concentration of power is high, while multiparty systems are related to consensual party systems with
a more equally distributed power (Duverger, 1954). Theoretical literature considered that two-party
systems have direct and indirect benefits: i) they offer voters a clear choice between two sets of public
policies, ii) they have a moderating influence and iii) they provide stable and effective policies (Lowell
1898). Conversely, other authors argue that although majority governments may be able to make
decisions faster than consensual governments, quick decision-making does not imply better outcomes.
In fact, the opposite may be more valid given that the more parties in the Parliament, the more likely
it is that every voter or group of voters will be faithfully represented by one of them (Taagepera and
Grofman 1985). Moreover, coherency of policies adopted by majority governments may be invalidated
by changing majority governments, since alternating between parties may lead to frequent drastic
changes and political instability (Lijphart 2012). According to this view, policies that are supported
by a broad consensus are more likely to be carried out successfully and last than those imposed by
absolute majorities.
We also run an additional experiment and we test whether party discipline affects either positively
or negatively legislative outcomes. In modern RG systems, political parties have gradually increased
and mantained high levels of internal discipline, with legislators sticking closely to the party line
or ideological position. This feature of the system, has been documented by several authors for
different countries (Cox 1987; Synder and Groseclose 2000; Huber 1996). However, to the best of
our knowledge there is no evidence on whether this feature is positively related with overall system

13

functioning beyond simulations of Pluchino et al. (2011) who find a negative effect. Table 2 shows the
results of the RG. Parliaments composed by one party generate the lowest level of social welfare, with
an average quality of Q = 0.0 points and a volatility value of V = 58. Under this distributive regime,
the percentage of approved proposals is around the 100% provided that the political party holding the
power controls all the legislative flow. As can be seen, in the two-party parliament, social gains are
higher than in one-party regimes and achieve an average legislative performance of 8 points. Notice
that in this scenario, the party with a minority passes few laws while the party in power approves
all of its proposals. However, both systems display a lower legislative quality than what is obtained
within a three-party framework. In the later, the average legislative quality of the system increases
due to the positive effect of an increasing number of proposals. This is because of the increase in the
number of proposals generated by additional political parties offsets the fall in the rate of adopted
laws stemming from a greater parliamentary fragmentation. Within the set of three-party systems, we
find that simple majority regimes generate higher social gains (Q = 36 + / 2) than those obtained
when one party enjoys absolute majority (Q = 15 + / 2). On the other hand, volatility outcomes
display a different pattern. With regard to the values of political system instability, we find that RG
systems with two parties are at an intermediate point between the maximum instability of three-party
models and absolute majority and that of the three-party simple majority RG regime.
Table 2: Baseline Representative Government Results
Number of Parties Average Quality Volatility Number of Proposals
of Legislation
One Party
0.0 +/- 2
58
100
Two-Party
8 +/- 2
61
200
Three Parties
Absolute Majority
15 +/- 2
66
300
Simple Majority
36 +/- 2
51
300

% Proposals
Approved
100
62.5
50
41.7

Notes:These results are obtained with a radius of tolerance of r = 0. The distribution of power in the
system with two political parties is 60-40.In the three party system the distribution of power for the
absolute majority regime is 60-30-10 while in the simple majority is given by 40-30-30.

In order to test the effect of party discipline we run simulations assuming a lower degree of party
discipline, that is, by increasing the radius of tolerance to r = 0.4. Table 3 shows the results of the
RG system in this new scenario. As observed, a lower level of party discipline increases the overall
quality of the system and generates less volatility. This result supports previous findings of Pluchino
et al. (2011).
It is important to highlight that previous results depend on the relative political power of each
party. In order to check whether previous results hold for all possible combinations of political power

14

Table 3: Representative Government Results. Radius of tolerance r = 0.4

Number of Parties Average Quality Volatility Number of
% of Approved
Proposals
Proposals
1 Party
0.0 +/-2
+ 58
100
100
2 Parties
12 +/- 2
67
200
67.2
3 Parties
Absolute Majority
18 +/- 2
66
300
51.6
Simple Majority
41 +/- 2
49
300
41.8
Notes:These results are obtained with a radius of tolerance of r = 0.4. The distribution of power in
the system with two political parties is 60-40.In the three party system the distribution of power for the
absolute majority regime is 60-30-10 while in the simple majority is given by 40-30-30.

weights we undertake a deeper analysis by means of a phase-diagram whose results are presented in
Figure 5 below. As it is observed, the highest levels of legislative quality are obtained in the red zone
where no party controls more than the 50% of the parliament, which ultimately implies it cannot
approve the 100% of its proposals. One level below, we find orange and yellow zones where there
is at least one party enjoying the 50% of the seats share. In such scenario, the dominant party is
always part of the government and will be able to approve its proposals. Green and blue zones are
characterized by absolute majorities which yield the lowest levels of legislature quality. This is due
to the fact that in such situations i) there are no parliamentary mechanisms to stop socially harmful
measures and ii) parties in minority do not have almost any of their proposals approved. These results
imply that the set of combinations where political power is more equally distributed among the three
parties tends to generate the highest social performance.
Figure 6 provides evidence on the possible states of volatility by exploring the whole set of power
combinations between political parties A, B and C. As it is observed, absolute majorities are characterized by a higher level of uncertainty in terms of legislative quality. Combinations that reduce
uncertainty are obtained in green and yellow zones where the concentration of political power is low.
Interestingly, the phase diagram shows the lowest levels of volatility are obtained when two of the
three parties have an equal weight of the 50% and the third party has no power.
Our results support Lipjharts (2012) thesis given that consensual systems typified by multi-party
parliaments are more likely to generate higher legislative quality than two-party parliaments. Taken
together, our findings suggest that i) multi-party systems outperform two-party ones in terms of
legislative quality, ii) egalitarian distributions of power increase legislative quality and lower volatility
and iii) party discipline decreases legislative quality and has no clear effect on political stability.

15

Figure 5: Legislative Quality Phase Diagram

Figure 6: Legislative Volatility Phase Diagram

16

3.2

Participatory Democracy

Participatory democracy is a form of political organization that advocates more involved forms of
direct citizen participation and greater political representation than traditional RG systems. Many
political scientists consider PD has several advantages when compared to RG systems (Burnheim
1985; Martin 1992; 1993; Barnett and Carty 2008). First, the inclusion of citizens to perform political
tasks, provided they are selected by lot from census, implies that social and demographic features
(income, race, religion, etc) will get an accurate representation in the Parliament. Second, participatory democracies organized through lotteries are essentially egalitarian since they guarantee equal
political power to everyone. Third, independent citizens selected by lot do not owe anything to anyone for their position, so they would be loyal only to their conscience, not to political Party, also
because they are not concerned in their re-election. Additional sound arguments are given by Landemore (2012a; b) or Ober (2010) who argue that PD systems organized through lotteries will produce
collectively-intelligent parliaments that will undertake correct decisions because of the existence of
negative correlations between members cognitive abilities. This, in turn, will reduce fluctuations of
legislative quality.
In order to analyze the net effect caused by citizen participation in a political system originally
consisting of three political parties, we augment the previous RG model with randomly selected legislators. This experiment allows us to disentangle the welfare gain effects related to the legislative
contribution of random citizen legislators from those originated by the transition from absolute to
simple majority regimes. We first simulate absolute majority regimes where the distribution of power
among parties is 60 30 10 for different radius of tolerance r = 0, 0.1 and r = 0.4. In a second place
we consider simple majority regimes where the distribution of power among parties is 40 30 30.
Figure 7 shows the sensitivity of the PD legislative quality as we vary the relative political power
share of random legislators in the legislative process, c. Absolute majorities are plotted with marked
continuous lines while simple majorities are plotted with dashed lines. Notice that the absolute majority regime is not conserved through all the experiment given that as we increase citizen participation,
political parties will lose their relative power share proportionally. To be precise, in this context we
can only talk about absolute majorities in the interval ranging from 0 to 16.84% of citizen legislators
given that beyond that threshold there is a regime transition.
As it is shown, legislative quality in a RG system just consisting of parties where one of them
has absolute majority is relative low when compared to simple majority scenarios. As in the previous

17

Figure 7: Participatory Democracy Baseline Results

experiment with the RG system, we observe a considerable welfare gain in the transition from absolute
majority regimes to simple majority ones for the different radius of tolerance considered. In particular, when moving from the scenario of 15% to that of 20% (crossing the distributive regime break up
threshold) of citizens we find the legislative quality experiences a positive jump which implies a considerable increase in social welfare. The implied legislative quality growth rates for the different regime
transitions are 88.01% if r = 0, 84.46% if r = 0.1 and 59.38% if r = 0.4 respectively. This change is
what Pluchino et al. (2011) solely attributed to the introduction of randomly selected legislators while
in fact reflects a regime transition. However, from this threshold onwards, any change in legislative
quality or volatility cannot be attributed to the changing distribution of power among political parties
but to citizen participation net effects. In particular, for the PD system where one party initially
enjoyed absolute majority, for r = 0, 0.1, 0.4 the maximum levels of quality are obtained with a citizen
share of 40% (QA,0.4 = 55.92) and 55% (QA,0.1 = 52.26) and (QA,0 = 51.74). Thus, we find the net
effect of citizen participation is positive implying an increase in the social welfare generated of about
39.27% in the case of r = 0.4 and 34.46% and 32.93% in the case of r = 0.1 and r = 0 respectively.
In the PD model with simple majority, for r = 0, 0.1, 0.4, the maximum levels of quality are
obtained with a citizen share of 45% (QS,0 = 57.37), 40% (QS,0.1 = 56.37) and 35% (QS,0.4 = 54.35)
respectively. Therefore, the net effect of direct citizen participation is positive and implies an increase
18

in social welfare with respect the RG of about 58.26% in the case of r = 0. If r = 0.1, the net
contribution of citizens yields an increase in legislative quality of 53.47% and 33.89% while in the case
of r = 0.4. An important feature emerging from this model is that legislative quality is a concave
function of the relative share of citizens which ultimately implies there is a maximum after which a
higher level of direct citizen participation will drop legislative quality. Moreover, it should be stressed
that the maximum legislative quality is obtained with a certain degree of political inequality between
agents. As a point of fact, above the 70% citizen share threshold, the performance of the system
starts to decrease abruptly. Indeed, our results suggest that the scenario of the AD, where all the
legislative tasks are implemented by randomly selected legislators and where political power is equally
distributed, delivers the lowest levels of legislative quality (Q = 6.08) and volatility (V=5.04).
Figure 8: Different Propositive Behavior

In Figure 8 we show how the effect of different propositive abilities affect legislative outcomes. As
it is shown, for r = 0, the legislative quality outcomes with passive citizens (CPi = 0, QA = 39.06) are
below those obtained with the baseline scenario (CPi = 1, QA = 51.6) or the highly-proactive scenario
(CPi = 2, QA = 66.7). This is also the case when we perform the analysis in the simple majority
scenario given that (CPi = 0, QS = 46.11) < (CPi = 1.QS = 57.91) < (CPi = 2, QS = 68.52). As
observed, in all cases, the relation between the power share of citizens and legislative quality displays
an inverted U shape and the effect of increasing the proactive ability of citizens always yields a positive

19

impact on final legislative outcomes.

Regarding the aggregate behavior of political volatility, we find that increasing citizen participation
always reduces political instability achieving its minimum level in the AD regime scenario (V = 5.04).
While the set of PD configurations yield an intermediate level of political volatility ranging from
Vmax = 46 to Vmin = 25, we find that RG systems with independence of the distribution of power
among parties are the most volatile ones with legislative quality fluctuations ranging from a maximum
of Vmax = 66 to a minimum volatility of Vmin = 48. This pattern is robust to different propositive
abilities. These results support the thesis of Landermore (2012a, b) given that increasing citizen
participation will produce collectively-intelligent parliaments and will reduce fluctuations from one
legislature to another.

3.3

The Citizen Senate

The last model we explore is the CS (Zakaras 2010). This system is similar to the PD parliament
where citizens are passive CPi = 0 but faces the problem of institutionalizing a democracy from
another angle. The idea of a citizen camera at the heart of political institutions comes from the
need to create a national, democratic and institutionalized control to monitor political activity the
emergence of corruption (Testa, 2010). In order to simulate CS dynamics, we model a bicameral
system where every law passed by the chamber composed by political parties needs to be reviewed
by randomly selected citizens allocated in the second chamber. Therefore, laws with a negative social
return may never get to be approved by the citizens, preventing governments to legislate against the
common good. In this model, citizens are required to achieve a level of consensus in order to veto any
proposal. However, if the majority needed to veto first chamber acts is too low, it may be the case
of the Senate to vote against too many laws, causing a government paralysis and hampering overall
legislative quality. In order to explore how to optimize the legislative performance of this political
system, we study the majority needed in the second chamber to veto first chamber acts. Our tests
are dedicated to explore the role played by different requirements to apply veto, taking into account
ranges going from absolute majorities (i.e, 50% + , with  > 0) to unanimity (100%).
As it is shown in Figure 9, the CS model displays the same result in absolute majority and simple
majority regimes as model simulations under both scenarios deliver the same optimal threshold in the
75% level, with an optimum value of of Q = 47.1 in the simple majority scenario and with r = 0.
Above the 75% level, the consensus is hardly ever achieved which in turn implies that vetoes are rarely
applied. In this situation, a number of bad proposals generated by political parties will be approved
20

and overall system quality will decrease. On the contrary, if the requirement to apply veto is below
the optimal level, the citizen senate will block too many socially desirable proposals. However, it is
important to note that in this model, under the optimal parameterization, citizen control enables a
higher legislative quality and lower instability than in the RG system. We conjecture that in models
with the possibility of abstention the optimal level for the veto will be below the 75% threshold.
Figure 9: Citizen Senate Results

21

Political Systems Evaluation

Under uncertainty, preferences on political system are significantly influenced by risk attitudes. As

a result, it is difficult to assess the merits and consequences of alternative systems without information
about the risk preferences of the population. We propose the use of a flexible utility function in the
nonlinear mean-standard deviation framework. The proposed form nests alternative risk preference
structures as special cases. We start by formalizing an agent risk attitude and choices over the set of
random legislative outcomes Yi characterizing each political system i. The V (i , i ) decision criterion
hypothesizes that an agents optimal choices are made by ranking alternatives through a preference
function defined over the first two moments of Yi , where i and i denote the mean and standard
deviation of Yi . Consider a decision maker whose utility function V is defined over the mean and the
standard deviation of Yi . Her risk attitude is reflected by:

S(, )

V (, )
V (, )


(8)

where subscripts denote partial derivatives. Note that S(, ) is the slope of the indifference locus in
the space. In particular we use the following flexible mean-standard deviation utility (MSU)
function:

V (, ) = M S

(9)

where and are the parameters describing attitudes towards risk. Under previous MSU form, it
follows that the risk attitude measure, S is given by:

S(, ) =

V (, )
V (, )


=

 

M 1 S 1

(10)

It has been shown by Meyer (1987) and Saha(1997) that MSU exhibits i) risk aversion, neutrality and
affinity as > 0, = 0 and < 0, ii) decreasing, constant and increasing absolute risk aversion as > 1,
= 1 and < 1 and iii) decreasing, constant and increasing relative risk aversion as > , = and
< . The various risk preference configurations considered in the simulations are summarized in
Table 5 below. The parametric values used the simulations were chosen in order to minimize utility
gaps and fluctuations between the variety of utility functions. As shown, not all functional forms
considered are consistent with risk lover profiles while risk adverse profiles admit a wider variety of
functional forms and parameter combinations. Specifically, if the purpose is to model a risk lover
22

valuation profile, some incompatibilities emerge in CARA + (CRRA, IRRA) and DARA + (CRRA
+ IRRA) combinations. This is because of risk affinity parameter values require < 0 and =
when 1 at the same time, which is impossible. It is important to note that the comparison of
political systems through the adoption of different functional forms depends heavily on the inputs of
the system: the quality and the volatility of the system. This, in turn, depends on the propositive
capability for the independents in the PD model and the tolerance radius and distribution of power
for the political parties in the RG. Here we will use the baseline values employed along the paper to
perform the comparison. Figure 10 shows the value in terms of utility of the different political systems
Table 4: Simulation Coefficients
Risk Averse
DARA
CARA
IARA
Risk Lover
DARA
CARA
IARA

DRRA
= 1.05, = 1
= 1, = 0.95
= 0.95, = 0.9
DRRA
= 1.05, = 1
= 1, = 1
= 0.95, = 1

CRRA
= 1.05, = 1.05
= 1, = 1
= 0.95, = 0.95
CRRA
NR
NR
= 1, = 1

IRRA
= 1.05, = 1.1
= 1, = 1.05
= 0.95, = 1.05
IRRA
NR
NR
= 1.05, = 1
Notes: DARA(CARA, IARA) denotes decreasing(constant, increasing) absolute risk .
aversion and DRRA(CRRA, IRRA) denotes decreasing(constant, increasing) relative
risk aversion

for risk-averse agents. The modeling of risk aversion in each of the political subsystems has been made
by computing the average over the entire set of compatible functional forms. As observed, risk averse
individuals prefer simple majority regimes over absolute majority ones. Maximum utility levels are
obtained under the PD where randomly selected individuals weight is obtained with c = 45% 50%.
An emerging feature of this modeling exercise is that by comparing RG with the AD we find that
risk averse individuals will tend to prefer the AD over the RG. This result is due to the fact that
although the RG generates a higher legislative quality, but the change in the type of parties with a
sufficient power share to pass all their initiatives from one legislature to another makes the system
highly unstable. On the contrary, the AD model is highly stable given that the rate of proposals is
very low, only selecting those who yield higher level of social welfare. Hence, risk averse individuals
will severely penalize fluctuations associated to RG and will obtain higher utility levels in lotterybased parliament designs. Finally, Figure 11 shows the corresponding utility measures of the political
systems when agents display risk affinity. Again, risk loving individuals prefer simple majority regimes
over absolute majority ones. We find that the best system irrespective of the risk profile is the PD
model. As regards the comparison between the RG with AD our findings suggest that risk loving
individuals prefer RG over the AD.
23

Figure 10: Utility of Risk Averse Individuals

Figure 11: Utility of Risk Averse Individuals

24

Conclusions
In this study we have investigated emergent legislative dynamics in a variety of political systems

by means of Monte Carlo simulations of distinct parliamentary agent based models. Political systems
based on suffrage and political party representatives such as the RG display higher social gains in multiparty environments than in two-party designs. Simple majorities display a superior social performance
than those obtained in the case of absolute majorities, which suggests that egalitarian distributions
of political power between political parties tend to increase overall social welfare. Furthermore, this
results are robust to the set of all possible combination of weights between the parties. Additionally,
by exploring the effect of party discipline in legislative outcomes we find such a property it is negatively
related to the political system performance.
On the other hand, unicameral PD political systems that combines political parties and random
legislators display an inverted U-shaped pattern between the power share of randomly selected politicians in the parliament and the total social performance. Our baseline modeling results suggests an
optimal share of citizens of about c = 45 50%. Under this distribution of power, society takes profit
of the higher diversity associated to random legislators and the di-congestion effects caused by some
political power concentration in the political parties. PD framework nests the prototypical AD, where
the share of citizens is 100%. The AD displays a low level of legislative quality but a marked stability.
We also explored the dynamics of a bicameral PD system, where randomly selected politicians are
allocated in the second chamber and have veto power. Among the set of possible consensus requirements to apply veto so that social welfare is maximized, we find a threshold on the 75% level. In this
model, under the optimal parameterization, citizen control enables a higher legislative quality and
lower instability than in the RG system.
In order to compare the performance of the different institutional systems we take into account the
different risk profiles of the population and we integrate each model results within the mean-standard
deviation utility analysis. With independence of the risk attitudes PD system delivers the higher
levels of utility. However, we find that risk-averse agents will prefer AD than RG. On the contrary,
risk lovers will prefer RG systems than AD.
We pursue to develop three extensions of the framework developed here. The first one is associated
to the simulation of the deliberative process. In our model, legislators are fixed entities in the Cipolla
diagram and they do not evolve as they listen other proposals and interact with other agents. Secondly,
we find that it may be interesting to simulate the model with abstention. Our legislators just vote

25

in favor or against any proposal and the possibility of abstention may affect the legislative outcomes.
A final extension of this model could be related to the introduction of time dependence in terms of
political power by simulating elections and voters behavior.

26

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