Words Get in the Way: The Effect of Deliberation in Collective Decision-Making

Abstract

We estimate a model of strategic voting with incomplete information in which committee members - judges in the US courts of appeals - have the opportunity to communicate before casting their votes. The model is characterized by multiple equilibria, and partial identification of model parameters. We obtain confidence regions for these parameters using a two-step estimation procedure that allows flexibly for characteristics of the alternatives and the individuals. To quantify the effects of deliberation on outcomes, we compare the probability of mistakes in the court with deliberation with a counterfactual of no pre-vote communication. We find that for most configurations of the court in the confidence set, in the best case scenario deliberation produces a small potential gain in the effectiveness of the court, and in the worst case it leads to large potential losses.