Calculus Of Consent Research Articles

Constitutional artisans: James Buchanan and Vincent Ostrom on artifactual man, the constitutional attitude, and the political economy of constitutional design

This paper examines the relationship between the work of James Buchanan and Vincent Ostrom. It adds to existing work by providing a comprehensive analysis of Buchanan’s and Ostrom’s changing views about how the ‘logical foundations of constitutional democracy’ should be conceptualised. The paper traces how in the 1960s and 1970s Ostrom took inspiration from the rational choice analysis of constitutional democracy in Buchanan and Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent, explaining how it shaped his reading of key texts in political theory and his analysis of public administration. It then discusses how Buchanan subsequently drew on Ostrom’s notion of artifactual man in developing his understanding of the ‘constitutional attitude’ necessary for individuals to engage in institutional design. It then explores how, from the mid-to-late 1990s, Ostrom became increasingly critical of Buchanan’s reliance on rational choice theory for his analysis of constitutional decision-making, identifying this as a key difference between their views.

On classical liberalism and democratic optimism: James M. Buchanan and Elinor Ostrom

We recently marked the 60th anniversary of the book that established the field of public choice – The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. It was also the 30th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom et al’s ‘Covenants with and without a sword’, in which she demonstrated the capacity of individuals for self-governance without submission to an external authority. This article considers these two foundational works as a starting point from which to explore the intellectual tradition of ‘democratic optimism’ in public choice. The Buchanan/Ostrom legacy is an unshakable faith in the capacity of individuals for self-governance, a significant departure from more orthodox thinking that presumed the necessity of a social planner to oversee, coordinate and enforce collective actions. Their work also illustrates the importance of questioning the assumptions of economic models and modes of thought. Examination of antecedent assumptions is useful not only for understanding the depth and complexity of economic and political choices, but also for thinking about the history of the economics discipline, the viability of research programmes and the ‘danger of self-evident truths’.

Economic planning must be polycentric, not monocentric: Introduction to a symposium on Mises and Hayek on socialism and knowledge

AbstractThe roaring (20‐) 20s are a decade of anniversaries and milestones. 2020 was the 100th anniversary of Ludwig von Mises's seminal article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and the 75th anniversary of F.A. Hayek's seminal article “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” 2022 brought a series of significant anniversaries: the 100th anniversary of Mises's Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis as well as the 60th anniversary of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom, and Murray Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State. It was also the 20th anniversary of Vernon Smith's Nobel Prize. The works and milestones celebrating anniversaries in 2022 owe much to Mises's and Hayek's pathbreaking contributions. This paper summarizes and contextualizes Mises's and Hayek's arguments about socialism and knowledge and introduces a Southern Economic Journal symposium on the anniversaries of “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” and “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

JAMES BUCHANAN, GORDON TULLOCK, AND THE “RADICALLY IRRESPONSIBLE” ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE DECISIONS

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock took a keen interest in the United States Supreme Court’s reapportionment decisions of the 1960s, which established a “one person, one vote” standard for state legislative apportionment. This paper traces the long arc of Buchanan and Tullock’s opposition to the “one person, one vote” standard.The Calculus of Consentoffers a highly qualified efficiency argument against “one person, one vote,” but over time Buchanan and Tullock grew even more vocally critical of the decisions. Buchanan ultimately advocated a constitutional amendment overturning “one person, one vote” in a private set of recommendations to Congressional Republicans. This paper additionally assesses Tullock’s 1987 complaint that scholars and judges neglectedThe Calculus of Consent’s analysis of reapportionment. A review of the reapportionment literature between 1962 and 1987 demonstrates that whileThe Calculus of Consentwas frequently cited, the literature generally ignored its analysis of the efficiency of apportionment standards.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

Are there Alternative Traditions in Public Choice? An Introduction

This brief note introduces readers to the papers published in this issue on the theme of “Alternative Traditions in Public Choice.” While the field of Public Choice is commonly seen to have been born of Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent (1962), the guest editors encouraged submissions to consider alternative influences. Instead, the papers illustrate the difficulty of disentangling Public Choice from the influence of Buchanan and the underlying political philosophy of the Virginia School. This suggests something about the importance of Buchanan in the field but, also, tells us that scholars themselves have difficulties to escape the path-dependence that exists in the history of economic thought.

Behavioral symmetry, rent seeking, and the Republic of Science

Scientific inquiry, like all other human activity, cannot be separated from the humans conducting the inquiry. While public discourse often treats science as sacrosanct and scientists as devoid of any but the purest motives, the science of science literature has long understood scientific inquiry as a fundamentally social activity undertaken by self-interested, partial, human choosers with limited information (Polanyi in Minerva 1(1):54–73, 1962; Kuhn in The structure of scientific revolutions. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1962; Leonard in J Econ Methodol 9(2):141–168, 2002). In this essay, we review the assumptions of two of the original contributions to the science of science literature regarding human agents and compare them to the assumptions underlying economic models. We assert that Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn did for the science of science literature what Buchanan and Tullock (The calculus of consent: Logical foundations of constitutional democracy. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1962) did for politics in the 1950s, which is to reassert behavioral symmetry. We then extend some of Buchanan’s insights from his study of politics and constitutions, public choice and constitutional political economy, to the study of science and draw out implications for interest-group influence in the republic of science.

Politics without romance? The pursuit of consent in democracy

ABSTRACTDemocratic governance is under increasing scrutiny as a result of waning trust in political institutions, and a widening gap between public aspirations and government performance. The purpose of this paper is to address what is currently diagnosed as a democratic deficit by calling into question the notion of consent, procedures advocated in its pursuit, and its relationship with democracy. To this purpose, the paper reviews seminal works that have investigated the nexus of democracy and consent over time: The Calculus of Consent, The Engineering of Consent and Manufacturing Consent. In this, it presents different understandings of the processes whereby consent is arrived at, and questions whether they support or undermine democratic aspirations.

Self-Governance, Robust Political Economy, and the Reform of Public Administration

This paper explains how to use the calculus of consent framework to think more rigorously about self-governance, and applies this framework to the issue of evaluating federal regulatory agencies. Robust political economy is the idea that institutions should be designed to work well even under weak assumptions about decision-makers' knowledge and benevolence. I show how the calculus of consent can be used to analyze both incentives and knowledge problems. The calculus is simultaneously a theory of self-governance and a tool for robust political economy analysis. Applying this framework to the case of public administration leads to the conclusion that private goods (such as medicine) tend to be over-regulated, public goods tend to be under-regulated (such as enabling too much pollution), and regulatory agencies tend to be over-centralized (most of them should either be replaced with certification markets or moved to state level).

Buchanan and Bloomington

Elinor Ostrom (2011) describes the work of James Buchanan as “foundational” to the Bloomington approach to political economy. This chapter explores the relationship between Buchanan’s “Virginia School” approach to that of the Bloomington School. We examine the foundational role of the Calculus of Consent, both in inspiring Vincent Ostrom’s Political Theory of a Compound Republic and as a key component of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework. We then outline other important connections and areas of overlap between the two schools of thought, such as self-governance and polycentricity.

Cookie Cutter Covenants: Regulation-Induced Homogeneity of Homeowners Associations

Several authors have argued that homeowners associations (HOAs) constitute an ideal institution for implementing Buchanan and Tullock's Calculus of Consent. HOAs provide collective goods and mitigate collective action problems. Developers offer constitutions ready-made, economizing on the decision-making costs which render unanimity infeasible. Competition will constrain real-estate developers to offer exactly those constitutions which consumers themselves would have crafted. However, critics of HOAs have voiced a variety of criticisms. For example, they allege that HOAs often suffer from a high degree of conflict and consumer dissatisfaction. I argue that government regulation – especially FHA mortgage underwriting – has homogenized HOAs, reducing the scope for competition and product differentiation. Developers often adopt legal boilerplate, lifting their HOA contracts from government handbooks. This reduced competition undercuts the economic justification of HOAs. To some degree, the flaws and shortcomings of HOAs may owe themselves to regulatory-induced homogeneity.

Escape from Europe: a calculus of consent model of the origins of liberal institutions in the North American colonies

The migration out of Europe and the establishment of North American colonies presents us with a great puzzle: why did the colonists establish democratic forms of governance? Considering that early democratic colonies appeared even before philosophical works such as those of Locke and Montesquieu were written, it is difficult to make the case that ideology was the driving factor. We show that the calculus of consent model proposed by Buchanan and Tullock (The calculus of consent, Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, 1962) offers a simple but subtle solution this puzzle. Because migrants formed much more homogeneous communities, and because, thanks to the large geographical expanse, the inter-jurisdictional externalities were small, the efficient level of consensus within each colony was much greater than in Europe, and the scope of efficient centralized decision-making was much smaller. Hence, a structure of decentralized democratic communities emerged as the efficient outcome.

Freedom of Association and its Discontents: The Calculus of Consent and the Civil Rights Movement

Does the classical liberal emphasis on freedom of association provide an intellectual cover for bigotry? We formulate this question in economic terms using James Buchanan’s economic approach to ethics, according to which moral values can be understood as preferences about other people’s behaviors. We discuss two possible market failures associated with freedom of association: inter-group externalities and Schelling-type emergent segregation. We show that the classical liberal position about freedom of association, as elaborated in Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent, is fully equipped to deal with the first one, but not with the second. The progressive view that some preferences are so offensive that they should be dismissed rather than engaged or negotiated with can be reframed as an attempt to solve the emergent segregation problem, but it is vulnerable to political economy problems of its own, in particular to an inherent tendency to over-expand the meaning of “bigotry.”

Direct constitutional democracy: Comment on “Proposals for a Democracy of the Future” by Bruno Frey

Bruno Frey’s effort to provoke a discussion on the future of democracy seems as timely as his focus on direct democracy is appropriate. Since in his account the necessity of protecting individuals against democratic collective powers seems somewhat neglected this comment emphasizes that the democratic theory of the Calculus of Consent is—in a way—all about the justificatory logic of such protections. In the same vein, referenda are endorsed as strengthening and initiatives rejected as weakening controls imposed on democratic powers in a constitutional democracy.

The Anarcho-Calculus of Consent: Proprietary Communities as Substitutes for the State

James Buchanan pioneered constitutional political economy, especially in The Calculus of Consent (with Gordon Tullock) and The Limits of Liberty. While he briefly considered private clubs and associations, he mostly limited his analysis to the traditional state. However, privately governed proprietary communities are capable of providing most public goods and internalizing most externalities. We argue that such proprietary communities offer a viable and feasible means for implementing a non-state-based constitutional political economy which satisfies Buchanan's own standards. The state is not necessary to accomplish Buchanan's goals, and Buchanan's works carry unrecognized anarchist implications.

James M. Buchanan: Neoclassical, Austrian, Neither, or Both?

James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013) received the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1986 for his work in public choice theory, set out in his The Calculus of Consent (1962), co-authored with Gordon Tullock. The Virginia School of Political Economy can be seen as a product of the work of Buchanan and Tullock, along with Ronald Coase, who published his ground-breaking paper on “The Problem of Social Cost” in 1960 while he was at the University of Virginia. This school of thought is generally thought to be in some ill-defined sense allied to the Austrian school of economics, mainly perhaps because of a shared pro-market policy stance. On the other hand, links between Buchanan and neoclassical economists such as Friedman and Stigler are frequently drawn, again probably with the pro-market policy recommendations of each in mind. It is notable that Buchanan, Hayek, and Friedman were all at various times presidents of the Mont Pelerin Society. Yet the differences between neoclassical and Austrian perspectives are profound. It has often been said that the one can be characterized as “equilibrium always” and the other as “equilibrium never”. The case of Buchanan and the Virginia School is therefore extremely interesting for the historian of economic thought. Significant questions are raised about the scope for reconciliation between schools of thought at the most profound levels of methodology and social philosophy. I posit that, allowing for a slight amount of breathing room, James Buchanan’s economic writings are more Austrian than anything else. From his earliest writings to his last publications, Buchanan clearly had an Austrian-leaning approach. Additionally, many of the criticisms he laid out about the economics profession were directed toward the more neoclassical minded among his peers. While the act of criticizing neoclassical economists does not indicate that Buchanan was an Austrian, it does seem to lay to rest any conclusions that he was a neoclassical economist himself.

Let’s agree not to agree: F. A. Hayek’s ‘calculus of consent’

Our paper aims to show that one of Hayek’s arguments in support of free-market capitalism - and against centralized planning, a regime of distributive justice and a bargaining democracy - rests on the contractarian criterion of voluntary agreement or voluntary consent. According to Hayek, people can reach consensual agreement on the desirability of a regime, free-market capitalism, whose operation necessarily produces nonconsensual results.

An expected utility analysis of k-majority rules

Buchanan and Tullok (The calculus of consent: logical foundations of constitutional democracy. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1962) argued that the optimal k-majority rule should minimize the sum of external costs and decision costs. Dougherty et al. (Public Choice, 163(1–2):31–52, 2015) formalized their approach using various groups of voters. In this study, we analyze the optimal k-majority rule in terms of expected utility and compare our results to Dougherty et al. (2015), which focuses on costs alone. Specifically, we replace Buchanan and Tullock’s external cost function with an external utility function that accounts for both the benefits and costs of enacting proposals. We find that analyzing k-majority rules in terms of utility, rather than costs, affects the optima. Furthermore, in terms of utility, the optimal k-majority rule can vary depending on the group one expects to be in during a vote. With some interesting exceptions, individuals from groups that favor the proposal often find small k-majority rules optimal. Individuals from groups that oppose the proposal often find large k-majority rules optimal.

Public Choice Originalism: Bork, Buchanan and the Escape from the Progressive Paradigm

In this essay I explore the connections between public choice and originalism, arguing that public choice is crucial to development of the originalism both in its diffuse popular and more academic form. As Robert Bork’s famous article, Neutral Principles and Some First Amendment Problems, illustrates, originalism begins as a reaction to the Warren Court, but it is a reaction that largely accepts the primacy of democratic majoritarianism that had begun in the Progressive era. It is public choice more than any other theory of politics that loosens the straightjacket that majoritarianism has on constitutional theory. In its more diffuse form, public choice with its emphasis on the self- interested nature of politicians, the power of interest groups, and the pathologies of collective choice made majority rule less attractive. James Buchanan’s contribution with Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent has particular relevance to originalism, because it decisively breaks from the idea that majority rule should be the presumptive norm in constitutional republics. If constitutions are best made by supermajority rules, as Buchanan and Tullock imply, originalism can be justified as a way of protecting the results of supermajoritarian constitutionmaking from change by either majorities or the peculiar submajorities that are comprised by the justices of the Supreme Court. As important as are the interpretive disputes within originalism, like that between original intent and public meaning, public choice’s inflection point may be more important because it moves originalism from a theory that was concerned primarily with protecting democratic majorities to a theory that was concerned with preserving a republican regime that was in its formation and essence nonmajoritarian. That shift in turn empowered originalism to become a much more aggressive theory of judicial review of legislation, creating more potential conflict between the judiciary and legislative majorities. The essay also briefly critiques some constitutional theorists who have stayed within the Progressive Paradigm, because their theories fail to solve the countermajoritarian difficulty at its heart. It ends with a description of four problems that public choice originalism has yet fully to address.

SOLIDARITY in the Moral Imagination of Bioethics

AbstractHow important is the concept of solidarity in our society's calculus of consent as regards the legitimacy and ethical and political support for public health, health policy, and health services? By the term “calculus of consent,” we refer to the answer that people give to rationalize and justify their obedience to laws, rules, and policies that benefit others. The calculus of consent answers questions such as, Why should I care? Why should I help? Why should I contribute to the public provision of others? Consent here does not have to be a deliberate, explicit act of informed agreement. And a calculus does not have to be a quantifiable, quasimathematical operation; more often, such a calculus takes narrative form in stories that a society tells about itself and that individuals tell about their place in it.One vital function of bioethics is to inform and shape those stories. Bioethics has the potential to offer society a keener insight into and perception of what is ethically at stake in controversies concerning health, science, and society. This insight is what we shall refer to as a “moral imagination,” by which we do not mean make‐believe or fantasy but, rather, the capacity to take a critical distance from the given, to think reality otherwise. The moral imagination enables one to see connections between factors at work in history, in large social and communal structures, and in the shape of one's own life, thoughts, and feelings. Here we are especially concerned with the contribution that the concept of solidarity can make to the moral imagination of bioethics. We contend that solidarity must become more widely active and explicit in bioethics analysis and argumentation as it endeavors to shape reasons for obeying norms and rules of common benefit in an open, diverse society.