Information aggregation in debate:who should speak first?

Privately informed individuals speak openly in front of other members of a committee about the desirability of a public decision. Each individual wishes to appear well informed. For any given order of speech, committee members may herd by suppressing their true information. With individuals of heterogeneous expertise, optimizing over the order of speech can improve the extraction of information, but not perfectly so. It is not always optimal to use the common anti-seniority rule whereby experts speak in order of increasing expertise. A committee with more able experts may be afflicted by greater herding problems, yielding a worse outcome

The acclamation consensus state and an associated ranking rule

The study of conditions, under which the existence of an “absolute” best winner can be assured, is a hot topic in the field of social choice. Unanimity is an evident example of a condition under which the winner is obvious. However, many more properties weaker than unanimity have been analysed in literature: the presence of a Condorcet winner, strong stochastic transitivity, the presence of a candidate that Borda dominates all other candidates, etc. Unfortunately, one could easily find a prominent ranking rule, for which the outcome does not agree with these relaxed conditions. In this study, we aim to identify a condition weaker than unanimity, but under which the social outcome is still obvious. This condition, defined as the conjunction of three properties already studied by the present authors and hereinafter referred to as acclamation, will be proven to be a meeting point for the most prominent ranking rules in social choice theory, and will be used for introducing an intuitively appealing ranking rule

Assessing the Reliability and Validity of Expert Interviews

Testing the reliability of experts should be a key element of expert interviews. Using the Condorcet Jury Theorem, it is shown that expert reliability can provide an indication of the validity of expert-opinion data. The theoretical framework is applied to expert-interview data collected in the Domestic Structures and European Integration (DOSEI) project. Special attention is paid to the role of ‘leading’ experts and salient issues. Evaluating the DOSEI data, the main findings are that (i) with some exceptions, there are acceptable levels of inter-expert agreement, (ii) whether the leading expert is included or not does not make a large difference to expert agreement, and (iii) experts are more in agreement on salient issues

Epistemic democracy: assaying the options

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Women\u27s dynamic role in the United States House of Representatives

At the outset of my studies, my goal was to look at women\u27s role in the United States Federal Government. The study was to span from the inception of the United States Government to the present. The purpose of the study was to highlight the large gender gap in the United States Government. However, I soon found there to be an overwhelming amount of material to discuss. Realizing the limited amount of space I had to fit my findings, I narrowed the topic to women\u27s role in the United States House of Representatives. Even with this narrowed scope, the gender gap in representation is obvious, and highlights the fact that America, even in the 21st Century, is not truly equal. The reason I mention the gender gap in the United States House of Representatives is not simply to dwell on the fact that one exists, but to discuss how and why it has remained a structural characteristic of the legislative body that is intended to be the closest to the people. In order to find answers to the questions aforementioned, it is necessary to discuss the evolution of ideals, principles, and beliefs possessed by the American population from 1776 to today. Even if there are no definitive answers to the questions posed above, it is my hope that the discussion will highlight the pivotal role of women in all stages of the United States\u27 existence, and underline the importance of women\u27s participation in the United States House of Representatives