Advisory Commissions Build Consensus from Ideological Diversity

• In Event: Assessing Inclusion and Diversity in the Policy Process

Abstract

This paper studies whether governments can build consensus on policy across the political aisle by including a broad cross-section of stakeholders in commissions providing advice on policy formulation. It would seem that including interested parties with conflicting preferences would increase conflict. However, it has been observed since Gosnell (1934) that ideologically inclusive advisory commissions reach unanimity with a surprisingly high frequency. I propose two reasons why diversity and inclusion can increase agreement. First, ideologically diverse parties from a variety of backgrounds can produce a greater variety of policy-relevant knowledge, increasing the valence of a proposal. Second, in a diverse commission, a proposal without broad appeal will lead some commission members to issue dissenting opinions, which reduce the government's willingness to follow the majority recommendation.
To establish that both of these factors help build consensus, I use a multi-method research methodology, first developing a theoretical model, then taking the model to data in the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models (EITM) approach. The theory shows that both of these factors help increase consensus by incentivizing commission members to coordinate on a policy recommendation that all actors weakly prefer to the government's outside option. To test the model's predictions, I use a novel, hand-collected data set of 2,705 Swedish commissions of inquiry that completed their inquiries between 1990 and 2018. Swedish governments appoint commissions for all significant legislative initiatives, so the data minimize selection bias. As the theory predicts, I find that increasing stakeholder representation in broadly representative commissions increases consensus.

Author

• Kira Pronin, University of Pittsburgh