TY  - JOUR
AU  - Maggi,Giovanni
AU  - Morelli,Massimo
TI  - Self Enforcing Voting in International Organizations
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10102
PY  - 2003
Y2  - November 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10102
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10102.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Giovanni Maggi
Department of Economics
Yale University
37 Hillhouse Avenue Rm 27
New Haven, CT 06511
Tel: 203/432-3569
Fax: 203/432-6323
E-Mail: giovanni.maggi@yale.edu

Massimo Morelli
Columbia University
E-Mail: mm3331@columbia.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -