Deliberation, leadership and information aggregation

We analyze committees of voters who take a decision between two options as a two stage process. In a discussion stage, voters share non verifiable information about a private signal concerning what is the best option. In a voting stage, votes are cast and one of the options is implemented. We introduce the possibility of leadership whereby a certain voter, the leader, is more influential than the rest at the discussion stage even though she is not better informed. We study information transmission and find, amongst others, a non-monotonic relation between how influential the leader is and how truthful voters are at discussion stage.