How to choose a fair delegation?

Abstract

This paper analyzes how to choose a delegation, a committee to represent a society such as in a peace conference. We propose normative conditions and seek Pareto optimal, consistent, neutral, and non-manipulable ways to choose a delegation. We show that a class of threshold rules is characterized by these criteria. The rules do not choose a fixed number of delegates, but instead require different sizes of delegations, depending on the heterogeneity in society. Therefore the resulting delegations are very inclusive, and with t delegates the ratio of individuals whose opinions are not included is always below 0.5. For instance, a delegation of size two should have at least 75% support from the society and therefore only less than 25% of the opinion pool can be neglected.