Political confederation

This article extends the spatial model of voting to study the implications of different institutional structures of federalism along two dimensions: d egree of centralization and mode of representation. The representation dime nsion varies the weight between unit representation (one state, one vote) a nd population-proportional representation (one person, one vote). Voters ha ve incomplete information and can reduce policy risk by increasing the degr ee of centralization or increasing the weight on unit representation. We de rive induced preferences over the degree of centralization and the relative weights of the two modes of representation and we study the properties of majority rule voting over these two basic dimensions of federalism. Moderat es prefer more centralization than extremists, and voters in large states g enerally have different preferences from voters in small states. This impli es two main axes of conflict in decisions concerning political confederatio n: moderates versus extremists and large versus small states.