Strategic Delegation and Voting Rules

Principals, such as voters or districts, typically benefit by strategically delegating their bargaining and voting power to representatives different from themselves. There are conflicting views in the literature, however, of whether such a delegate should be "conservative" (status quo biased) or instead "progressive" relative to his electorate. I show how the answer depends on the political system in general, and the majority requirement in particular. A larger majority requirement leads to conservative delegation and hence a status-quo bias, but optimal delegation is always achieved by the appropriate voting rule. The model is simple and can be employed, for example, to compare decentralization and centralization.