Agenda Control

Storable Votes allow voters to transfer votes across decisions. Is precise knowledge of the agenda essential to the positive properties of the mechanism? The chapter studies a committee where the chair has agenda power. In the first half of the chapter, the chair controls the order of the proposals, from a fixed and known agenda. In the second half, the chair controls both the order and the content of the agenda. The theory shows that in both cases control of the agenda matters to the rest of the committee because it grants the chair the possibility to transmit information about his priorities. Unless other members feel particularly strongly about those same decisions, it is in their interest not to compete with the chair. The chair always gains, while the welfare impact on the other voters is of variable significance and always small in magnitude. In laboratory experiments, subjects have difficulty identifying the informative strategies, but payoffs are once again very close to theoretical predictions. Thus the welfare effect of agenda control is minor, and the comparison to simple majority voting is unchanged, relative to the fixed agenda case: bonus votes matter, the chair's control of the agenda does not.