t is often suggested that requiring juries to reach a unanimous verdict reduces the probability of convicting an innocent defendant while increasing the probability of acquitting a guilty defendant. We construct a model that demonstrates how strategic voting by jurors undermines this basic intuition. We show that the unanimity rule may lead to a high probability of both kinds of error and that the probability of convicting an innocent defendant may actually increase with the size of the jury. Finally, we demonstrate that a wide variety of voting rules, including simple majority rule, lead to much lower probabilities of both kinds of error.

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A t least since Downs's (1957) seminal work An Economic Theory of Democracy, rational choice theorists have appreciated the "paradox of not voting." In a large election, the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small. If each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome, then even a small cost to vote-like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather-should dissuade anyone from voting. Yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines, daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote. Given the central place of voting within political economy, the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem.For the most part, theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices. The problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior. In primary elections, there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates (Abramson, Aldrich, Paolino and Rohde, 1992). In a seminal and comprehensive study, Cox (1997) shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models. For example, under plurality rule (in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election),

T" ~W ~Te present a framework to analyze the ejects of constitutional features on legislative voting with 1 / 1 / respect to cohesion and the distribution of payoffs. We then apply this framework to parliamentary V V democracies and show how a prominent feature of decision making in parliaments, the vote of confidence procedure, creates an incentive for ruling coalitions to vote together on policy issues that might otherwise split them. The key feature that creates cohesive voting is the fact that votes on bills are treated as votes on who controls floor access in future periods. As a consequence, legislative majorities capture more of the legislative rents from the minority in parliamentary democracies than in nonparliamentary settings.