Cloturing Deliberation

We study how the institutional arrangements for ending deliberation --- the ``cloture rules'' --- interact with collective learning to affect the outcomes of decision making in committees. In contrast to much of the previous literature on deliberative committees, this paper makes a distinction between the final votes over policy proposals and the cloture votes that bring them about. Using this approach, we explore how cloture rules influence the course of deliberation, the likelihood of inefficient deliberative outcomes, the circumstances surrounding failures to bring proposals to a final vote, and the distribution of power among committee members in the deliberative process. We also use our simple model to examine the issue of the stability of cloture rules, characterizing the rules that no coalition of committee members is able or willing to overturn. We show in particular that all cloture rules are dynamically stable.

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