Research on the formal properties of democratic aggregation mechanisms has a long tradition in political science. Recent theoretical developments, however, show The question of what motivates individual behavior in social interactions is central for a better understanding of democratic decision making. Do individuals selfishly maximize their own material welfare, or do they take the well-being of others into account? There is a wealth of experimental evidence that such social preferences play an important role in all sorts of games (see Fehr and Fischbacher 2002). Individuals display other-regarding behavior, considering distributional consequences of their choices. Furthermore, several models of individual behavior incorporate these experimental findings (e.g., Bolton and Ockenfels 2000; Charness and Rabin 2002;Fehr and Schmidt 1999;Frohlich, Oppenheimer, and Kurki 2004). However, our knowledge of the existence and effects of social preferences in democratic decision making is still rather limited. In this article, we focus on the existence of social preferences in majority decision making, which is arguably the most important mode of democratic decision making. We present results from laboratory experiments which show that individual behavior in majority decisions is mainly driven by self-interest and fairness. We thank Jens Grosser for his invaluable advice on the experimental design. We further thank Rebecca Morton, Bernhard Kittel, and Wolfgang Luhan for comments on earlier versions of this article and Ulrich Glassmann for his assistance in the laboratory. Suggestions of the journal's editor and several anonymous referees were particularly helpful to improve the article. Financial support from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the Cologne Laboratory for Economic Research is also gratefully acknowledged.Recent theoretical developments demonstrate that the further development of democratic theory profits from paying more attention to the actual shape of preferences. For instance, Tyran and Sausgruber (2006) study individuals voting over redistribution. Their model predicts failure of redistributive policies if all players are exclusively egoistically motivated. However, employing a utility function from the Fehr and Schmidt (1999) model, which assumes that individuals are both self-interested and inequality averse, Tyran and Sausgruber (2006) analytically demonstrate that even a weak concern for equality can lead to the adoption of redistributive policies. Frohlich and Oppenheimer (2007) have developed a formal model which demonstrates that, even in genuine distributional problems, cyclic majorities can be overcome if individuals hold sufficiently strong social preferences. Frohlich and Oppenheimer assume a societal shared conception of justice without specifying what justice concretely is. Individuals are upset by injustice and experience it as a cost. There is thus a possible trade-off between material self-interest and justice. Individ...

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Spatial committee decision-making experiments provide ample evidence for the predictive power of the majority rule core if it is not empty. Furthermore, an empty core does not substantively reduce the stability of majority decision making. In this article, I put these two findings to a critical test using two preference configurations from Fiorina's and Plott's (1978) seminal committee experiments. In my experiment, committees with fixed individual preferences make multiple decisions over time. Contrary to the existing evidence, I find that results diverge from the core in the course of the experiment. In line with previous research, an empty core has no noticeable behavioral effects.

In light of the so-called 'chaos theorems' from social choice theory, William Riker (W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1982) argues that the indeterminacy of majority rule leads to voting cycles making democratic decisions arbitrary and meaningless. Moreover, when the core is empty, majority instability correlates with the level of conflict among actors. This study uses laboratory committee decisionmaking experiments to provide an empirical test of both aspects of Riker's argument. Committees make repeated majority decisions over 20 periods picking points from a two-dimensional policy space. The experiment manipulates committee members' preferences and thus varies the existence of a core and the level of conflict between group members. The experimental results contradict Riker's interpretation of the chaos theorems' implications. Thus, the core exhibits less attraction than generally assumed. Moreover, an empty core is not associated with increased majority rule instability. Instead, conflicting preferences lead to more instability irrespective of the existence of an equilibrium.

The tyranny of the majority is one of the most frequently discussed problems of democracy in political theory. It arises when winning majorities are fixed and permanent, and there are no checks on the majority’s ability to dominate the minority. In this paper, I investigate the effects of communication on the occurrence of majority domination. Theoretically, communication cuts both ways. On the one hand, forming and maintaining a coalition requires coordination between individuals, which is barely accomplishable without opportunities to communicate. On the other hand, communication strengthens prosocial orientations in groups and should thus prevent the permanent exclusion of minorities. I argue that publicity of communication is crucial. The prosocial effects of communication dominate when communication is public whereas exclusive majorities form under private communication. I test my claim in a series of laboratory experiments where five-member committees make distributional decisions using the voting mechanism ‘voting by veto’. Compared to a baseline treatment without communication, groups distribute benefits more equally when they have the opportunity to communicate in a public chat. When communication is private, however, majoritarian coalitions form that exclude a minority of group members from the distribution of benefits.