Deliberative Forms of Democracy and Intergenerational Sustainability Dilemma

Sustainability

Raja Rajendra Timilsina¹  Pankaj Koirala¹  Koji Kotani¹ 

[1] School of Economics and Management, Kochi University of Technology, Kochi 782-8502, Japan;

关键词: democracy;    decision;    majority voting;    deliberation;    intergenerational accountability;    intergenerational sustainability;   

DOI  :  10.3390/su13137377

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Intergenerational sustainability (IS) has emerged as the most serious social problem reflecting climate change and accumulation of public debt in modern democratic societies, undermining the potential interests and concerns of future generations. However, little is known about whether or not deliberative forms of democracy with majority voting help support at maintaining IS by representing future generations’ potential interests and concerns. We institute IS dilemma game with three forms of decision-making models with majority voting and examine how they maintain IS in laboratory experiments. In the IS dilemma game, a sequence of six generations is prepared where each generation consisting of three subjects is asked to choose either maintaining IS (sustainable option) or maximizing their own generation’s payoff by irreversibly costing the subsequent generations (unsustainable option) with anonymous voting systems: (1) majority voting (MV), (2) deliberative majority voting (DMV) and (3) majority voting with deliberative accountability (MVDA). In MV and DMV, generations vote for their choices without and with deliberation, respectively. In MVDA, generations are asked to be possibly accountable for their choices to the subsequent generations during deliberation, and then vote. Our analysis shows that a decision-making model with only majority voting generally does not address IS, while DMV and MVDA treatments induce more and much more generations to choose a sustainable option than MV, respectively. Overall, the results demonstrate that deliberation and accountability along with majority voting shall be necessary in models of decision-making at resolving IS problems and representing future generations’ potential interests and concerns.

【 授权许可】

Unknown