In earlier chapters, we have presented a model of how people vote in a “committee” setting. As the reader will recall, the assumptions of committee voting are: (a) Each participant has full information about all possible alternatives and has well-defined preferences over those alternatives; (b) those preferences are separable across issues, so that even if the policy space is multidimensional, we can act as if issues are voted on one at a time; (c) each participant knows the preferences of all other participants; (d) all participants have free, equal power to propose alternatives; and (e) votes are assumed to be sincere, in the sense that if a member prefers alternative A to alternative B, he or she votes for A over B in a pairwise majority rule comparison.

We have also noted that this model is only a starting point. Real committee voting decisions are far more complicated. One complication is that the location of members' “ideal points” is the result of a variety of outside pressures and use of information, so that the ideal point is induced rather than being a primitive “preference.” Still, since we have taken member ideal points as exogenous, accounting for the origin or process of formation of the preference is not too difficult.