A consensus model of political decision-making

Harrie de Swart (1) , Patrik Eklund (2) , Agnieszka Rusinowska (3)

1 Faculteit Wijsbegeerte-Logica en taalanalyse
2 Department of Computing Science
3 GATE - Groupe d'analyse et de théorie économique

In this paper, a model of political consensus is introduced. Parties try to reach consensus in forming a government. A government is defined as a pair consisting of a winning coalition and a policy supported by this coalition, where a policy consists of policies on given issues. A party evaluates all governments the party belongs to with respect to some
criteria. We allow the criteria to be of unequal importance to a party.
These criteria concern winning coalitions and policy issues. Parties may
be advised to adjust their preferences, i.e., to change their evaluation
concerning some government(s) or/and the importance of the criteria, in order to obtain a better political consensus.

Mots clés: consensus reaching; consensus degree; government; coalition; policy

Domaines: Economies et finances

Harrie de Swart, Patrik Eklund, Agnieszka Rusinowska. A consensus model of political decision-making. Annals of Operations Research, 2008, 158 (1), pp. 5-20. ⟨halshs-00283200⟩