Deciding When to Decide: Collective Deliberation and Obstruction

Abstract

We study the impact of deliberation rules on collective learning and decision making in committees. In contrast to much of the existing literature, this article makes a distinction between the final votes over policy proposals and the cloture votes that bring them about. We show how deliberation rules can cause Paretoinefficient outcomes and failures to bring good proposals to a final vote, and how they affect the distribution of power among committee members in the deliberative process. We further show that deliberation rules are dynamically stable, even when they generate Pareto-inefficient outcomes.