Question

What are the advantages and disadvantages of logrolling? How can logrolling for two pure public goods under majority rule prevent the attainment of efficient outcomes? Can you give an example where logrolling improves efficiency?

Answer 1

A practice common in the U.S. Congress and in many other legislative assemblies in which two (or more) legislators agree for each to trade his vote on one bill he cares little about in exchange for the other's vote on a bill that is personally much more important to him. Logrolling is especially common when the legislators are relatively free of control by their national party leaders and are trying to secure votes for bills that will concentrate sizable benefits on their own home districts while spreading most of the costs out over taxpayers in the rest of the country. Local projects such as Federally funded dams, bridges, highways, housing projects, VA hospitals, job-training centers, military bases and the like are often pushed through by logrolling.

Advantage of logrolling

The majority party enjoys the monopoly of deciding whether a bill will pass through or not. The minority party will also get some benefit. The bill they bring forth will not face much opposition; as long as they engage in vote trade with the majority party.

Disadvantage of logrolling

The major demerit of this exercise is that it opens a channel for corruption and selfishness among the participants. If the minority party cannot give political favors, they may end up giving financial motivation to the majority party in exchange for their support.

Logrolling is explicit trading of votes on issue of great interest to voters. When two or more issues ( goods) under majority voted under simultaneously, implicit logrolling can occur. Under these circumstances,two issues that cannot be approved if voted on seperately could pass. Logrolling offers an outlet to express intensity of feeling on an issue in a one-person, one vote democracy. However logrolling also can cause losses in effeciency.

Logrolling tends to improve the efficiency of the political process,even though these parties are widely criticized on ethical grounds. They demonstrated, however that even though logrolling is possible, simple majority rule is likely to produce undesirable collective decision decisions, for example by over-investing in the public sector. Indeed,they further demonstrated that asystem in which the open buying and selling of political votes is encouraged tends to improve the efficiency.

Recognition of the facts that preferences intensities over policy alternatives differ among the electrode may encourage the rational individual to favour the bicameral over unicameral legislature as a basic for constitutional design. A property designed bicameral legislature, offering different bases of representation, will discriminate automatically between legislation on which the intensity of desire is more or less equal. This will significantly improve the efficiency of political process.