Hi Ali,
You may be interested
in the “Calculus
of Consent”, a somewhat utopian model where votes are
required to be
unanimous, and where payments are officially negotiated
with those who view a
proposed law as operating against their self interest, and
therefore they want
payment to offset their losses. The URL is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Calculus_of_Consent:_Logical_Foundations_of_Constitutional_Democracy
A snippet from there
is below, with my highlighting
for this
group.
The
Calculus of Consent
The Calculus
of Consent: Logical Foundations
of Constitutional Democracy is a book
written by economists James
M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in 1962. It is
considered to be one
of the classic works from the discipline of public
choice in economics
and political science. This work
presents the basic
principles of public choice theory.
The
analytical approach of the authors is based on methodological
individualism - collective action is
composed of individual actions
and on the rejection of any organic interpretation of the
state [1].
A purely individualistic
conception of collectivity is maintained: the state is an artifact, created
by men and thus subject to
change and perfection. Buchanan and
Tullock maintain that only
constitutional changes, which can be shown to be in the
interest of all
interested parties can be judged as "improvements" and
therefore
consider conceptual unanimity as the only legitimate
decision-making rule.
The
authors analyze the traditional political science approach
to voting systems,
including majority voting as the
standard as opposed to the unanimity
rule. They show that none of those systems are 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 require
unanimity or at least supermajority systems.
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 support or oppose it, but many
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
optimality). 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 certain things that
the previous models of
politics could not.
Employing
the theoretical concepts of game theory and Pareto
optimality, Buchanan and Tullock show that symmetry
in benefits sharing may
be at most a necessary,
but never
a sufficient
condition for the
attainment of a Pareto optimal position. The introduction
of side payments it
the crucial element, which would lead to optimality. In a
sense the
introduction of side payments creates marketable property
rights of the
individual political vote (Chapter 12)[2].
The idea of
compensation for those
affected by a proposed law, requiring their vote or the
law won’t be
enacted, appeals to me, though the practicality of
requiring unanimity
seems
utopian to me.