Christopher Beam on Slate.com framed the Senate (or any democratic deliberative body) as “the world’s greatest collective-action problem“. In a way, it is. Debating on issues and surfacing potential problems stakeholders might face and arguing on the different consequences on different parties is one thing about parliaments and national assemblies but then decision-making is another.
In democracies, debates and discussions are known to hold up decision-making and the same is reflected in bureaucratic bodies where power is shared across several individuals. This dispersion of power calls for coordination to get anything done and thus allow game theoretical analysis to dissect the dynamics involved in any of those coordination outcomes (ie the final decision).
In some sense, this is a trade-off; deliberation this way that involves the coordination game ensures that the outcome cannot be entirely fair though it might provide an illusion of it. In the first place, reality includes a spectrum or even several dimension of opinions and no system can be designed to capture and aggregate this complexity. The authors of Thinking Strategically mentions this in one of the chapters on elections. As a result, we are left with the political game that is manipulating the legislative structure although everyone hates to admit it. In some sense, Singapore’s structure might churn out better results in terms of efficiency and do ‘the right thing’. The idea then, is to move the game away from the ballot box in the first place, to somewhere further and higher.