The Calculus of Consent

Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1962

Link

https://archive.org/details/calculusofconsen0000jamematched

Cited from

computer_science, economics_finance

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Anti-Commons Tragedy
  • In standards-setting consortia where every member holds a veto, the standard freezes.

    This sourceFoundational public-choice analysis showing that a unanimity (full-consent) decision rule, while Pareto-protective, carries prohibitive decision-making costs because any single party can hold out — the institutional mechanism by which veto-driven gridlock arises in unanimity-rule bodies such as standards-setting consortia.

• Consensus
  • The structural results transfer as hard constraints: the fault- tolerance threshold tells the system designer how many bad-faith jurors the rule can absorb before valid agreement becomes structurally unattainable, and the quorum-intersection argument is the same one that justifies supermajority requirements in legislatures, where overlapping panels must not be able to ratify conflicting rulings.

    This sourceAnalyzes optimal k-majority (including supermajority) voting rules as a tradeoff between external costs and decision costs — the rationale for supermajority thresholds in legislatures and constitutional amendment.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 1 other way.

• https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/170066 ×1

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