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 that founded the discipline of public choice in economics and political science. For other uses, see Book (disambiguation). ... Economists are scholars conducting research in the field of economics. ... For other persons named James Buchanan, see James Buchanan (disambiguation). ... Gordon Tullock (born February 13, 1922 in Rockford, Illinois) is currently professor of law and economics at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia. ... Year 1962 (MCMLXII) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1962 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Public choice theory is a branch of economics that studies the decision-making behavior of voters, politicians and government officials from the perspective of economic theory. ... Face-to-face trading interactions on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political Science is the field concerning the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behaviour. ...

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: Vote redirects here. ... Simple majority voting is a straightforward form of voting whereby the option with a simple majority of votes wins. ... A Tradeoff usually refers to losing one quality or aspect of something in return for gaining another quality or aspect. ...

• 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. In economics external cost refers to a negative side-effect of an economic transaction, an act of exchange, consumption, or production. ... A supermajority or a qualified majority is a requirement for a proposal to gain a specified level or type of support which exceeds a simple majority in order to have effect. ...

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. Public choice theory is a branch of economics that studies the decision-making behavior of voters, politicians and government officials from the perspective of economic theory, namely game theory and decision theory. ... Public interest is a term used to denote political movements and organizations that are in the public interest—supporting general public and civic causes, in opposition of private and corporate ones (particularistic goals). ... Look up Aggregation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary The term aggregation may refer to— in economics, combining entities into a single entity which represent them, like aggregation of individual demand to total, or market, demand. ...

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 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 some things that the previous models of politics could not. Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is a central concept in game theory with broad applications in economics, engineering and the social sciences. ... Logrolling is a colorful phrase used to describe trading of votes by legislative members to obtain passage of actions of interest to each legislative member. ...

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 Methodological individualism is a philosophical orientation toward explaining broad society-wide developments as the accumulation of decisions by individuals. ... Rational choice theory assumes human behavior is guided by instrumental reason. ... Social choice theory studies how individual preferences are aggregated to form a collective choice, such as, for example in voting systems. ...

• 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

Part IV. The Economics and the Ethics of Democracy Simple majority voting is a straightforward form of voting whereby the option with a simple majority of votes wins. ... Game theory is a branch of applied mathematics that is often used in the context of economics. ... Majoritarianism (often also called majority rule) is a political philosophy or agenda which asserts that a majority (sometimes categorized by religion, language or some other identifying factor) of the population is entitled to a certain degree of primacy in society, and has the right to make decisions that affect the... Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is a central concept in game theory with broad applications in economics, engineering and the social sciences. ... Income redistribution, or the redistribution of wealth, is a political policy usually promoted by members of the political left, and opposed, or less strongly supported, by members of the political right. ... The economic theory of collective action is concerned with the provision of public goods (and other collective consumption) through the collaboration of two or more individuals, and the impact of externalities on group behavior. ... Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) is a voting procedure employed in the Council of the European Union for some decisions. ... In politics, representation describes how residents of a country are empowered in the government. ... This article is about bicameralism in government. ...

• 18. Democratic Ethics and Economic Efficiency
• 19. Pressure Groups, Special Interests, and the Constitution
• 20. The Politics of the Good Society
• Appendix 1 Marginal Notes on Reading Political Philosophy
• Appendix 2 Theoretical Forerunners

There are several measures of economic efficiency: Pareto efficiency Kaldor-Hicks efficiency X-efficiency Allocative efficiency For applications of these principles see: Efficient market hypothesis Welfare economics Production theory basics See also Business efficiency Inefficiency ... Advocacy is an umbrella term for organized activism related to a particular set of issues. ... Advocacy is an umbrella term for organized activism related to a particular set of issues. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box:      Political philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the state, government, politics, liberty, justice, property, rights, law and the enforcement of a legal code by authority: what they are, why (or even if) they are needed, what makes a government legitimate, what...

See also

Social Choice and Individual Values (1963), p. 120, for Arrow's defense of transitivity over unanimity Kenneth Arrows monograph Social Choice and Individual Values (1951, 2nd ed. ... In mathematics, a binary relation R over a set X is transitive if it holds for all a, b, and c in X, that if a is related to b and b is related to c, then a is related to c. ...

External link

• Ebook online at the Library of Economics and Liberty