Majority rule – positive properties

Abstract

But as unanimity is impossible, and common consent means the vote of the majority, it is self-evident that the few are at the mercy of the many. John Adams Majority rule and redistribution As Chapter 4 indicated, a committee concerned only with providing public goods and correcting for externalities might nevertheless choose as its voting rule the simple majority rule, if it placed enough weight on saving time. But speed is not the only property that majority rule possesses. Indeed, once issues can pass with less than unanimous agreement, the distinction between allocative efficiency and redistribution becomes blurred. Some individuals are inevitably worse off under the chosen outcome than they would be were some other outcome selected, and there is in effect a redistribution from those who are worse off because the issue has passed to those who are better off. To see this point more clearly, consider Figure 5.1. The ordinal utilities of two groups of voters, the rich and the poor, are depicted on the vertical and horizontal axes. All of the members of both groups are assumed to have identical preference functions. In the absence of the provision of any public good, representative individuals from each group experience utility levels represented by S and T . The point of initial endowment on the Pareto-possibility frontier with only private good production is E . The provision of the public good can by assumption improve the utilities of both individuals.