Propose or Vote: A Canonical Democratic Procedure

Abstract

This paper introduces Propose or Vote (PoV), a democratic procedure for collective decision-making and elections that does not rely on a central mechanism designer. In the first stage, members of a polity choose whether to become proposal-makers or to participate only as voters. In the second stage, voters decide by majority voting over the set of submitted proposals. With appropriately chosen default points, PoV implements the Condorcet winner in a single round of voting whenever one exists. We show that this implementation is globally unique when the number of members is odd; for an even number of members, uniqueness can be restored by adding an artificial agent. PoV can also be applied to elections, where agents decide whether to stand as candidates or vote over the resulting candidate set.