The Calculus of Consent

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The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy is a book written by economists James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in 1962.

The Calculus... is considered to be one of the classic works that founded the discipline of public choice in economics and political science.

Authors analyse the traditional political science approach to voting systems, including majority voting as the standard instead of unanimity voting. They show that none of those systems is perfect, since there is always a tradeoff:

a simple majority-based system imposes varying amounts of both external costs and decision-making costs
a unanimity-based system has little or no external costs, but considerable decision-making costs.

They conclude that decisions with potentially high external costs should be require unanimity or at least in supermajority systems.

This work presents the basic principles of public choice theory. While many political scientists define the political process as a system in which the policy decisions are viewed as a private interest vs. public interest struggle, Buchanan and Tullock suggest that the public interest is simply the aggregation of private decision makers.

They show that in classical political science theory, the "public interest" is always the correct choice with the same appeal to all voters, which may or may not be opposed by "special interests". But that theory ignores the fact that most choices appeal to many different "law consumers" with varying strengths.

An illustrative example is a choice whether to increase funding for health care. Some voters will strongly favor or oppose, but many voters may not care at all.

They compare this to a market transaction, where the voters strongly desiring better health care could purchase the acceptance of the opposition and uninterested voters with concessions, resulting in an efficient allocation of resources, increasing the happiness of all parties (Pareto optimum). However the equivalent of this in the political realm is that politicians buy the votes of other politicians (or groups of special interest) by promising to vote for their issues. In the authors' opinion such log-rolling is to be expected, but in the traditional political science theory, it is anomalous. Thus their model explains some things that the previous models of politics could not.

[edit] Table of contents

Part I. The Conceptual Framework

1. Introduction
2. The Individualistic Postulate
3. Politics and the Economic Nexus
4. Individual Rationality in Social Choice

Part II. The Realm of Social Choice

5. The Organization of Human Activity
6. A Generalized Economic Theory of Constitutions
7. The Rule of Unanimity
8. The Costs of Decision-Making

Part III. Analyses of Decision-Making Rules

9. The Structure of the Models
10. Simple Majority Voting
11. Simple Majority Voting and the Theory of Games
12. Majority Rule, Game Theory, and Pareto Optimality
13. Pareto Optimality, External Costs, and Income Redistribution
14. The Range and Extent of Collective action
15. Qualified Majority Voting Rules, Representation, and the Interdependence of Constitutional Variables
16. The Bicameral Legislature
17. The Orthodox Model of Majority Rule