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# Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency

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We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an "efficiency golden rule" which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.
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arXiv:1103.1224v1 [physics.soc-ph] 7 Mar 2011
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Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can
Improve Parliament Eﬃciency
A. Pluchino1, C. Garofalo2, A. Rapisarda1, S. Spagano3and M. Caserta3
1Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Universita di Catania, and INFN sezione di Catania, - Via S. Soﬁa 64,
I-95123 Catania, Italy
2Dipartimento di Analisi dei Processi Politici, Sociali e Istituzionali, Universit´a di Catania, Via Vittorio Emanuele
II 8, I-95131 Catania, Italy
3Dipartimento di Economia e Metodi Quantitativi, Universit´a di Catania, Corso Italia 55, I-95100 Catania, Italy
PACS 89.75.-k – Complex systems
PACS 89.65.-s – Social and economic systems
PACS 02.50.Le – Decision theory and game theory
PACS 87.23.Ge – Dynamics of social systems
Abstract. - We study the prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political
Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected inde-
pendent legislators can increase the global eﬃciency of a Legislature, in terms of both number of
laws passed and average social welfare obtained. We also analytically ﬁnd an ”eﬃciency golden
rule” which allows to ﬁx the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that
regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These
results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that
the adoption of random strategies can improve the eﬃciency of hierarchical organizations.
Introduction. – In ancient Greece, the cradle of
democracy, governing bodies were largely selected by lot
[1–6]. The aim of this device was to avoid typical de-
generations of any representative institution [7]. In mod-
ern democracies, however, the standard is choosing rep-
resentatives by vote through the Party system. Debate
over eﬃciency of Parliament has therefore been centred
on voting systems, on their impact on parliamentary per-
formances and, ultimately, on the eﬃciency of economic
system [8–12]. In this paper, rediscovering the old Greek
wisdom and recalling a famous diagram about human na-
ture by C.M.Cipolla [13], we show how the injection of a
measure of randomness improves the eﬃciency of a par-
liamentary institution. In particular, we develop an agent
based model [14] of a prototypical Parliament and ﬁnd
an analytical expression, whose predictions are conﬁrmed
by the simulations, that determines the exact number of
randomly selected legislators, in an otherwise elected par-
liament, required to optimize its aggregate performance
(number of approved acts times average social gain). This
result is also in line with the recent discovery [15,16] that,
under certain conditions, the adoption of random promo-
tion strategies improves the eﬃciency of a human hierar-
chical organization.
The paper is organized as follows. In the ﬁrst section we
describe the Parliament model and its dynamics. In the
second section we present the main numerical and analyti-
cal results. Then we discuss several historical examples in
order to give an empirical support to our ﬁndings. Finally,
conclusions and remarks are drawn.
The Parliament Model. – Human societies need
institutions [17–19], since they set the context for indi-
viduals to trade among themselves. They are expected,
therefore, to have an impact on the ﬁnal outcome of those
trading relations [20,21]. This paper looks at a speciﬁc in-
stitution, the Parliament, designed to hold the legislative
power and to ﬁx the fundamental rules of society.
The Cipolla Diagram. A Parliament can be modeled
as resulting from the aggregate behavior of a number of
legislators, who are expected to make proposals and vote.
In so doing they are pictured as moved by personal in-
terests, like re-election or other beneﬁts, and by a general
interest. Taking both motivations into account, it is pos-
sible to represent individual legislators as points li(x, y)
(with i= 1, ..., N ) in a diagram (see Fig.1), where we ﬁx
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A. Pluchino1 C. Garofalo2 A. Rapisarda1 S. Spagano3 M. Caserta 3
arbitrarily the range of both axes in the interval [1,1],
with personal gain on the x-axis and social gain on the
y-axis. Each legislator will be therefore described through
his/her attitude to promote personal and general interest.
This diagram takes after a very famous one proposed in
1976 by the economic historian Carlo M. Cipolla [13], who
represented human population according to its ability to
promote personal or social interests, coming up with four
diﬀerent categories of people: Intelligent people (points in
the top right quadrant, i.e. individuals whose actions pro-
duce a gain for both themselves and other people), Help-
less/Naive people (points in the top left quadrant, i.e. in-
dividuals whose actions produce a loss for themselves but
a gain for other people), Bandits (points in the bottom
right quadrant, i.e. individuals whose actions produce a
gain for themselves but a loss for other people) and Stupid
people (points in the bottom left quadrant, i.e. individuals
whose actions produce a loss for themselves and also for
other people). Of course people do not always act consis-
tently: for example, under certain circumstances a given
person acts intelligently and under diﬀerent circumstances
helplessly. Therefore each point in the Cipolla diagram
represents the weighted average position of the actions of
the correspondent person.
The basic idea of this study is to use the Cipolla classiﬁca-
tion in order to elaborate a prototypical agent based model
[14] of a Parliament with only one Chamber, consisting of
N= 500 members and K= 2 Parties or Coalitions, and to
evaluate its eﬃciency in terms of both approved acts and
average social gain ensured. In particular, all the points
representing members of a Party will lie inside a circle
with a given radius riand with a center Pi(x, y) falling
in one of the four quadrants. Of course we are not inter-
ested here in classifying individuals or Parties (considered
as a whole) as intelligent, bandits, helpless or stupid, but
only in representing them according to their attitude to
promote personal or social interest. The center of each
Party is ﬁxed by the average collective behavior of all its
members, while the size of the respective circle indicates
the extent to which the Party tolerates dissent within it:
the larger the radius, the greater the degree of tolerance
within the Party. Therefore, we call the circle associated
to each Party circle of tolerance.
It is clear that, in real Parliaments, the fact of belonging
to a Party increases, for a legislator, the likelihood that
his/her proposals are approved. But it is also quite likely
that the social gain resulting from a set of approved pro-
posals will be on average reduced if all the legislators fall
within the inﬂuence of some Party (more or less author-
itarian). In fact, even proposals with little contribution
to social welfare will be approved if Party discipline pre-
vails, while, if legislators were allowed to act according to
their judgement, bad proposals would not receive a large
approval. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to ex-
plore how the global eﬃciency of a Parliament may be
aﬀected by the introduction of a given number Nind of in-
dependent members, i.e. randomly elected legislators free
Fig. 1: Cipolla Diagram. Each point in this diagram, with
coordinates in the intervals [1,1], represents a member of a
given realization of our Parliament model, according to his/her
attitude to promote personal or social interests. The Parlia-
ment consists of N= 500 members: black points represent
Nind = 250 independent legislators, while green and red points
refer to the remaining members, belonging to the majority
(51%) and minority (49%) Parties respectively. The circles
of tolerance of the two Parties, with equal radius r=0.3, are
explicitly drawn (notice that some free points could appar-
ently fall within the circle of tolerance of some Party, but of
course the correspondent legislators will remain independent).
Finally, the two grey areas indicate the acceptance windows of
the independent legislator li(x, y ) and of the Party P1.
from the inﬂuence of any Party, which will be represented
as free points on the Cipolla diagram.
Dynamics of the Model. The dynamics of the model
is the following. During a Legislature Leach legislator
(agent) lican perform only two simple actions: (i) propos-
ing an act and (ii) voting (for or against) a proposal.
The ﬁrst action does not depend on the membership of the
agent: each legislator proposes one or more acts of Parlia-
ment (an, with n= 1, ..., Na, being Nathe total number of
acts proposed by all the legislators during the Legislature
L), with a given personal and social advantage depending
on his/her position on the diagram (i.e. an(x, y)li(x, y)
for every act proposed). It follows that legislators belong-
ing to a Party can propose acts which are not perfectly in
agreement with the Party’s common position, as function
of their distance from the center Pi(x, y) of the correspon-
dent circle of tolerance.
The action of voting for, or against, a proposal is more
complex and strictly depends on the membership of the
voter and on 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
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Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Eﬃciency
be accepted by the voter, whose position ﬁxes the lower
left corner of the window (see Fig.1). This follows from
the assumption that legislators are able to recognize bet-
ter and worst proposals than their ones, but only accept
proposals better (or equal) than their ones.
The main point is that, while each free legislator has
his/her own acceptance window, so that his/her vote is
independent from the others vote, all the legislators be-
longing to a Party always vote by using the same accep-
tance window, whose lower left corner corresponds to the
center of the circle of tolerance of their Party. Further-
more, any member of a Party accepts all the proposals
coming from any another member of the same Party. But,
while the perception of the social advantage y(an) (i.e. the
y-coordinate) of a given act ancan be likely considered
as unambiguously determined for each legislator or Party,
the perception of the personal advantage x(an) (i.e. the
x-coordinate of an) cannot. Indeed, the fact that a certain
anwould be favorable for a given legislator, does not im-
ply that it should be favorable for another legislator or for
a Party. Therefore, the coordinate x(an) of any proposed
act has to be diﬀerent for any legislator or Party and will
be expressed by a random number x, called voting point,
uniformly extracted in the interval [1,1].
Finally, calling Nacc the number of the accepted acts, the
eﬃciency Ef f (L) of a Legislature is calculated as:
Ef f (L) = (Nacc
Na
·100) ·1
Nacc
Nacc
X
m=1
y(am) (1)
i.e. as the product of the percentage of accepted acts
times the average social welfare Y(L) ensured by these
acts. Therefore it is a real number included in the interval
[-100,100]. In order to obtain a global eﬃciency measure
independent of the particular conﬁguration of Parliament,
simulation results for Eq.(1) has been further averaged
over 100 Legislatures, each one with Na= 1000 proposals
and a diﬀerent distribution of legislators and Parties on
the Cipolla diagram.
Simulation Results. – In Fig.2 we plot the global
eﬃciency of the Parliament for three diﬀerent sizes of the
two Parties (panel (a): 51%-49%; panel (b): 60%-40%;
panel (c): 80%-20%), as function of an increasing number
Nind of independent legislators. In all the three panels
the two extreme cases, corresponding to Nind = 0 (only
Parties) and Nind =N(no Parties), show a very small ef-
ﬁciency (close to zero). On the other hand, a pronounced
peak in the global eﬃciency is always obtained between
these extremes, thus identifying an optimal number N
ind
of independent legislators (see vertical dashed lines). This
peak, very sharp in panel (a) with N
ind = 20, becomes
broader and shifts to the right in panels (b) and (c), with
N
ind = 140 and N
ind = 280 respectively. Such an eﬀect
suggests that, if the two competing Parties have a sim-
ilar size, even a small number of independent members
present in the Parliament, playing a role of balance, can
Fig. 2: Simulation Results. The global eﬃciency of a Parlia-
ment with N= 500 members and two Parties P1and P2, with
circles of tolerance of two sizes, r= 0.1 (circles) and r= 0.4
(squares), is plotted as function of an increasing number of
independent legislators Nind . Each point represents an aver-
age over 100 Legislatures, each one with 1000 proposals of acts
of Parliament coming from randomly selected legislators. The
three panels diﬀer in the percentage of the (NNind) members
assigned to the two Parties. In Panel (a): 51%, 49%; Panel (b):
60%, 40%; Panel (c): 80%, 20%. In all the panels, for a spe-
ciﬁc N
ind (indicated by a red dashed line), it is visible a peak
in eﬃciency which shifts from left to right going from the top
to the bottom panel and whose value decreases increasing the
radius of the Parties.
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A. Pluchino1 C. Garofalo2 A. Rapisarda1 S. Spagano3 M. Caserta 3
fairly improve the global eﬃciency. On the contrary, when
one Party is quite bigger that the other one, the number
of independent legislators required for enhancing the eﬃ-
ciency of the Parliament increases.
Let us discuss in detail, ﬁrst, the results obtained in the
two limiting cases of a Parliament with Nind = 0 or
Nind =N.
Parliament with 2 Parties and Nind = 0.The ef-
ﬁciency of a Parliament with Nmembers in absence of
independent legislators strictly depends, for a given Legis-
lature L, on the random position of the centers of the two
Parties, with coordinates, respectively, x(P1), y(P1) and
x(P2), y(P2) over the Cipolla diagram (see Fig.1), but also
on their size (in terms of percentage of members) and on
the radius rof their circle of tolerance. Suppose to as-
sign a percentage pof legislators to P1and the remaining
(100p) to P2. Let us to consider a sequence of Na= 1000
acts of Parliament, proposed each time by a randomly cho-
sen legislator. Actually, in the further limiting case of a
radius r= 0, we have the following two possibilities:
(i) If y(P2)< y(P1), only and all the acts of Parliament
coming from Party P1will be accepted, since members of
P1will never vote for any proposal coming from P2, and
the percentage of accepted proposal during the Legisla-
ture Lwill be equal to the percentage p of members of
Party P1; it follows that the average social welfare Y(L)
of the accepted acts will approximately coincide with the
y-coordinate of P1, i.e. Y(L)y(P1).
(ii) If y(P2)> y(P1), in addition to all the proposals of P1,
will be also accepted those proposals of P2which will ran-
domly fall in the acceptance window of P1. This will de-
pend on the coordinate x(P1) and will occur with a prob-
ability 1x(P1)
2(such a probability is 1 for x(P1) = 1 and
0 for x(P1) = 1), thus yielding a correspondent increment
in both the percentage of accepted proposals and the av-
erage social welfare with respect to the previous case. Of
course non-null values of the radius rwill produce slight
modiﬁcations in these predictions.
Results of Fig.2 (where averages over 100 Legislatures,
each one with a diﬀerent position of P1and P2over the
Cipolla diagram, have been considered) conﬁrm the pre-
vious arguments. In all the three panels we observe, in
correspondence of Nind = 0, small values of the global
eﬃciency, calculated by the expression of Eq.(1). These
values derive from the product of the number of accepted
proposals, which oscillates between the percentage pof
members in the majority Party and 100%, and an almost
null value of the average social welfare, due to the fact
that, when one averages over the entire set of 100 Leg-
islatures, the values of y(P1) result uniformly distributed
along the y-axis. Therefore, a Parliament with two Parties
and without independent legislators free from the inﬂuence
of Parties results to be not very eﬃcient.
Parliament with no Parties and Nind =N.Let us
consider, now, the opposite situation in which only inde-
pendent legislators are present in the Parliament. In this
Fig. 3: Eﬃciency Golden Rule. The optimal number of inde-
pendent legislators N
ind is plotted (full circles) as function of
the size p(in percentage) of the majority Party P1, for our
Parliament with N= 500 members and two Parties. An av-
erage over 100 Legislatures, each one with 1000 proposals of
acts of Parliament, has been performed for each point. This
plot is invariant for values of the radius of the Parties in the
range [0.1,0.5]. The dashed line represents the prediction of
the eﬃciency golden rule (see text).
case no Parties exist and the points li(x, y), correspond-
ing to the N= 500 members of Parliament, are uniformly
distributed over the Cipolla diagram (see Fig.1). It is ev-
ident that now a given act of Parliament an(x, y) will be
accepted only if the majority N
2+1 of these points will ful-
ﬁll the prescriptions y(lj)< y(an) and x(lj)< x(an), be-
ing x(an) the x-coordinate of the voting point an(x, y),
randomly extracted with uniform distribution over the
straight line of equation y=y(an) for each legislator lj
which is requested to vote for an.
Being li(x, y) uniformly distributed on the plane, for a
given value of y(an) only about 50% of the ˜
N(an) legisla-
tors with y(lj)< y(an) will accept the proposal. But such
a number will be clearly lower than N
2unless y(an)1: in
fact, only in this latter case the half-plane y < y(an) will
coincide with the entire Cipolla diagram and ˜
N(an)
2N
2.
Thus it follows that, during a Legislature L, only a very
small number of proposals will be accepted, but with a
very high social gain y(an)1. In conclusion, the prod-
uct of these two quantities, further averaged over 100 Leg-
islatures, each one with a diﬀerent random distribution
of legislators over the Cipolla diagram, will stay again
near to zero, giving the small global eﬃciency observed for
Nind = 500 in all the three panels of Fig.2. This means
that it seems not to be advantageous to eliminate com-
pletely Parties from a Parliament.
The Eﬃciency Golden Rule. At variance with the rel-
atively simple behavior of the system in the two limiting
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Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Eﬃciency
cases Nind = 0 and Nind =N, the general case with
0< Nind < N is much more complex to manage and
it is absolutely not trivial to predict the eﬃciency value
of the peaks shown in the three panels of Fig.2, which
stays approximately constant although it depends on all
the features that aﬀect the voting process. However, quite
surprisingly, a simple argument can be advanced in order
to ﬁnd the optimal number N
ind of independent legislators
as function of the size p(in percentage) of the majority
Party.
Actually, we can intuitively suppose that, in a given Leg-
islature and in presence of two Parties with diﬀerent sizes,
none of which would have the absolute majority of the
members in the Parliament (due to the presence of in-
dependent members), N
ind would be in some way corre-
lated with the minimum number of independent legislators
which, added to the majority Party P1, allows to reach the
threshold of N
2+ 1 members necessary to accept a given
proposal an. But we know from the previous subsection
that, being the independent legislators lj(x, y) uniformly
distributed over the Cipolla diagram, for a given value of
y(an) only about 50% of all the independent members with
y(lj)< y(an) will vote for the proposal, equivalent to the
˜
N(an) points lying in the left half of the half-plane below
the line of equation y=y(an). Such a rule continues to
apply also in the presence of Parties. In this case, being a
generic y(an) randomly distributed over the y-axis during
many Legislatures, we can safely assume that, in average,
the line y=y(an) will coincide with the x-axis, there-
fore, for a given Nind , only Nind
4independent members
(i.e. those lying in the left half of the half-plane y < 0)
will vote the proposal. Thus, in order to ﬁnd N
ind, it is
enough to add this number to the number of members of
the majority Party P1, i.e. (NN
ind)·p
100 , and to impose
the following equality:
(NN
ind)·p
100 +N
ind
4=N
2+ 1 (2)
Finally, solving this equation with respect to N
ind, one
easily obtains:
N
ind =2N4N·(p/100) + 4
14·(p/100) .(3)
This prediction closely matches the numerical results of
simulations performed for several values of p, as shown in
Fig.3. We checked that it is veriﬁed for several sizes N
of the Parliament and that is independent of the number
of Legislatures and of the number of proposals for each
Legislature. Being also independent of the radius of the
circles of tolerance of the Parties, we argue that Eq.(3)
could be considered an universal golden rule for optimiz-
ing the eﬃciency of any social situation with two com-
peting groups of elected people through the introduction
of randomly selected independent voters. Thinking of a
practical application for a real Parliament, the knowledge
of the golden rule would allow to ﬁx the optimal number
of accidental politicians to be chosen at random, by pick-
ing them up from a given list of candidates (i.e. ordinary
citizens ﬁtting the requirements), after that regular elec-
tions have established the relative proportion of the two
Parties or Coalitions.
Discussion and Historical Review. – Probably,
for a modern political observer, our ﬁndings could sound
very strange. In fact, today, most people think that
democracy means elections, i.e. believe that only electoral
mechanism could ensure representativeness in democracy.
However, as already anticipated in the introduction, in the
ﬁrst signiﬁcant democratic experience, namely the Athe-
nian democracy, elections worked side by side with random
selection (sortition) and direct participation. Actually, in
that period Parties did not exist at all and random selec-
tion was the basic criterion when the task was impossible
to be executed collectively in the Assembly, where usually
Athenian citizens directly made the most important deci-
sions. Of course only the names of those who wished to
be considered were inserted into the lottery machines, the
kleroteria [1–6].
Sortition was not used in Athens only. Probably, already
others Greek city-states adopted the Athenian method,
even if historical documentation is dubious. For sure,
many others cities in the history used some kind of lot
as rule, such as Bologna, Parma, Vicenza, San Marino,
Barcelona and some parts of Switzerland. Lot was also
used in Florence in the 13th and 14th century and in
Venice from 1268 until the fall of the Venetian Republic in
1797, providing opportunities to minorities and resistance
to corruption [22].
In the course of history, little by little, the concept of rep-
resentativeness overlapped with that of democracy, until
it became its synonymous. Consequently, today, in con-
temporary institutions, almost any random ingredient has
been expunged. Among the few historical vestiges of sor-
tition, there are the formation of juries in some judicial
process and the selection by lot in some public policy [23].
Actually, even if nowadays the information and communi-
cation technology would revitalize the possibility of direct
democracy, (the so-called E-democracy), this idea meets
opposition as much as random selection, since the rep-
resentative system, and his correlated Party system, is
strongly believed to be the only way to make society a
democratic place.
On the other hand, the drawbacks of Party system have
been well documented. For example, the iron law of oli-
garchy of the sociologist Robert Michels [7], states that
all forms of organization, democratic or not, inevitably
develop into oligarchies. The indispensability of leader-
ship, the tendency of all groups to defend their interests
and the passivity of represented people, are only a few of
the many reasons that deteriorate every democratic Party
system. In the representative democracy this process is
even institutionalized. Party elites act to serve the Party
and themselves, often at the expenses of the public in-
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A. Pluchino1 and C. Garofalo2 and A. Rapisarda1 and S. Spagano3 and M. Caserta 3
terest. If some members of Parliament vote against the
Party line on any issue, these are likely to be ostracized,
expelled, or not endorsed at the next elections.
Of course free elections are an indubitable progress in com-
parison with authoritarian regimes, but today the electoral
system tends to form a democratic aristocracy, where rep-
resentatives are superior to the electorate. In particular,
the representativeness is organized by ideas, or classes,
which ﬂow together into the Parties’ programs. Unfor-
tunately, this kind of organizations (in turn, institutions)
very slowly accept social changes because of several in-
comes that they ensure [9]. Therefore, in the last decades,
the idea of choosing representatives by random selection
has been re-introduced in political reﬂections and gained a
fair number of supporters. Demarchy, or statistical democ-
racy, is the name proposed by someone [24–32]. Accord-
ing to these supporters there would be several advantages
in the sortition method. For example, social and demo-
graphic features (income, race, religion, sex,) would get a
fair distribution in the parliament, so the interest of the
people would get a more eﬀective representativeness and
politically active groups in society, who tend to be those
who join political Parties, would not be over-represented.
On the other hand, representatives appointed by sortition
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. Furthermore, sortition may be less corruptible
than elections. It is easy to ensure a totally fair procedure
by lot. On the contrary the process of elections by vote
can be subject to manipulation by money and other pow-
erful means.
In this context our results, on one hand, conﬁrm the poor
eﬃciency of a Parliament based only on Parties or Coali-
tions (see the case Nind = 0) but, on the other hand, cor-
roborate the constructive role of independent, randomly
selected, legislators. In any case, it is worthwhile to stress
that, in our proposal, the electoral system is not elimi-
nated at all but only integrated with a given (exactly de-
termined) percentage of randomness.
Before closing this section, let us remark that our ﬁnd-
ings are also perfectly in line with recent studies [15, 16]
about the eﬀectiveness of random promotion strategies in
hierarchical organizations. In these studies, that one of
promoting people at random has been shown to be, under
certain conditions, a convenient way to circumvent the ef-
fects of the so-called ”Peter Principle” [33] and to increase
the eﬃciency of a given pyramidal or modular organiza-
tion. We think that random selection could be of help in
contrast Peter Principle eﬀects also in the context of par-
liamentary institutions, which are exposed to analogous
risks linked to the change of competences required to the
elected people in their new political positions.
Conclusions and Remarks. – In this paper, by
means of a prototypical Parliament model based on
Cipolla classiﬁcation, we demonstrated that the fact of in-
troducing a well-deﬁned number of random members into
the Parliament improves the eﬃciency of this institution
and the social overall welfare that depends on its acts. In
this respect, the exact number of random members has
to be established after the elections, on the basis of the
electoral results and of our analytical ”golden rule”: the
greater the size diﬀerence between the Parties, the greater
the number of members that should be lotted to increase
the eﬃciency of Parliament.
Of course our prototypical model of Parliament does not
represent all the real parliamentary institutions around
the world in their detailed variety, so there could be many
possible way to extend it. For example it would be inter-
esting to study the consequences of diﬀerent electoral sys-
tems by introducing more than two Parties in the Parlia-
ment, with all the consequences deriving from it. Also the
government form could be important: our simple model
is directly compatible with a presidential system, where
there is no relationship between Parliament and Govern-
ment, whereas, in the case of a parliamentary system, also
such a link should to be considered in order to evaluate
the overall social welfare. For simplicity, we chose to study
a unicameral Parliament, whereas several countries adopt
bicameralism. So, the presence of another chamber could
bring to subsequent interesting extensions of the model.
Finally, we expect that there would be also several other
social situations, beyond the Parliament, where the intro-
duction of random members could be of help in improving
the eﬃciency.
In conclusion, we think that the introduction of random
selection systems, rediscovering the wisdom of ancient
democracies, would be broadly beneﬁcial for modern in-
stitutions.
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New institutional economics (NIE) studies institutions and how institutions interact with organizational arrangements. Institutions are the written and unwritten rules, norms and constraints that humans devise to reduce uncertainty and control their environment. These include (i) written rules and agreements that govern contractual relations and corporate governance, (ii) constitutions, laws and rules that govern politics, government, finance, and society more broadly, and (iii) unwritten codes of conduct, norms of behavior, and beliefs. Organizational arrangements are the different modes of governance that agents implement to support production and exchange. These include (i) markets, firms, and the various combinations of forms that economic actors develop to facilitate transactions and (ii) contractual agreements that provide a framework for organizing activities, as well as (iii) the behavioral traits that underlie the arrangements chosen. In studying institutions and their interaction with specific arrangements, new institutionalists have become increasingly concerned with mental models and other aspects of cognition that determine how humans interpret reality, which in turn shape the institutional environment they build (North 1990, p. 3–6; Williamson 2000).
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