Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that incorporating randomly selected independent legislators into a parliamentary system can enhance overall efficiency, increasing law passage and social welfare, with an analytical rule guiding optimal random selection.

Contribution

It introduces a model showing how random legislators improve parliament efficiency and derives an 'efficiency golden rule' for optimal random selection.

Findings

Random legislators increase law passage rates.

Optimal number of random legislators maximizes social welfare.

Results align with ancient Greek democracy and modern organizational strategies.

Abstract

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an "efficiency golden rule" which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.