The Calculus of Consent¶
Buchanan, J. M., & Tullock, G. (1962). The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 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.
- In standards-setting consortia where every member holds a veto, the standard freezes.
- 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.
- 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.
Domain-specific¶
- Government Failure
- The unifying analytical move — developed through the public-choice program of Buchanan, Tullock, and their collaborators — is to treat the government as a set of self-interested actors operating under specific institutional constraints rather than as a benevolent social planner
This sourceModels collective choice as the choices of individual utility-maximizers acting under decision rules, rejecting the organic-state and 'public interest' conception of government.
Supported in partVerified against the source
- The unifying analytical move — developed through the public-choice program of Buchanan, Tullock, and their collaborators — is to treat the government as a set of self-interested actors operating under specific institutional constraints rather than as a benevolent social planner
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