On the membership of decision making committees

Abstract

The decision of a committee is determined jointly by the votingprocess it adopts and the composition of its membership. The paper analyses the process through which committee members emerge from the eligiblepopulation and traces the consequences of this for the decisions ofthe committee. It is shown that the equilibrium committee will becomposed of representatives from the extremes of the tastedistribution. These extremes balance each other and the committeereaches a moderate decision. However, this mutual negation by theextremes is a socially wasteful use of time. Data from the UK Houseof Lords is used to illustrate these results.