Search

Some committees are made up of experts, persons interested in both the (subject) matter at hand and in coming across as able decision-makers. Such committees would like to conceal disagreement from the public. We present a theory that describes the reaction of experts to the requirement to publish verbatim transcripts of their meetings: the emergence of an informal ‘premeeting’; the move of the real debate from the formal meeting to the premeeting; and the drop in disagreement in the formal meeting. We analyse what the effect is on accountability and quality of decision-making. Finally, we present evidence suggesting that our model describes the way members of the Federal Open Market Committee in the United States responded to the publication of verbatim transcripts of their meetings.

This discussion paper led to a publication in the 'European Journal of Political Economics', 2004, 20, 255-262. In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. Thereason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the sameexpectation. In this paper we study the normative implications of convergence in a simple model of electoralcompetition, in which parties are uncertain about voters' preferences. We show that if political parties haveincomplete information about voters' preferences, the voters may prefer some degree of policy divergence. Theintuition is that policy divergence enables voters to correct policies that are based on a wrong perception of theirdesires.