Douglas W. Rae

Decision-Rules and Individual Values in Constitutional Choice

Once a political community has decided which of its members are to participate directly in the making of collective policy, an important question remains: “How many of them must agree before a policy is imposed on the community?†Only if participation is limited to one man does this question become trivial. And this choice of decision-rules may seem only a little less important than the choice of rules in a world so largely governed by committees, councils, conventions, and legislatures. This paper is about the consequences of these rules for individual values.Both the oral and written traditions of political theory have generally confined the search for optimal (or “best†) decision-rules to three alternatives. The rule of consensus tells us that all direct participants must agree on a policy which is to be imposed. Majority-rule tells us that more than half must concur in a policy if it is to be imposed. And the rule of individual initiative (as we may call it), holds that a policy is imposed when any single participant approves of it. These three decision-rules—“everyone,†“most of us,†and “anyone†—are terribly important, but they cannot be said to exhaust the available alternatives.The list of alternatives is just as long as a committees roster. Only for a committee of three would ‘consensus,’ ‘majority’ and ‘individual initiative’ exhaust the possibilities. In a committee of n members, we have n possible rules. Let the decision-rule be a minimum number of individuals (k) required to impose a policy.

A Note on the Fractionalization of Some European Party Systems

“Fractionalization” is a concept which may be substituted for the awkward and theoretically wasteful notion of “multipartism,” which ordinarily results in the nominal classification of one-, two-, and multi-party systems. This more traditional classification, of course, leads to a number of annoying questions: (1) Where ‘ d o we draw the cutting points between classes (Is Great Britain’s a two-party system, or must we say something like “two-and-one-half”)? (2) Is it useful to treat these classes as though they were homogeneous (Are Israel and Austria profitably classed together as multi-party systems)? And, most important, (3) what theoretical use does the classification have (How is it to help with theory-building)? I t may make sense not to answer these questions, give up the scheme, and substitute the concept of “fractionalization.”

Decision Rules and Policy Outcomes

Contemporary political science is rightly concerned with the complex relationship between the political process and the public policies in which it results. In understanding this relationship, it may be useful to distinguish two complementary aspects of the political process: (1) those which are relevant because they account for the policy preferences of elite-members and, (2) those elements, like voting and bargaining, which are of interest because they determine policy outcomes from given configurations of elite preferences. This paper offers a theoretical model for an important component of this second aspect: it is explicitly addressed to legislative voting processes and the underlying strategies of legislators as these contribute to the determination of policy outcomes. And, for the present, we take preference-formation as given.

Maximin Justice and an Alternative Principle of General Advantage

John Rawlss theory of justice tries to resolve the question of fair allocation: When, if ever, may some members of society claim rightful privilege over their fellows? Rawlss answer is maximin justice: inequalities are just if, by permitting them, society treats best those whom she treats worst. Rawls attempts to show that this rule binds us all under the terms of a social contract. The present paper tries to show that Rawlss theory will not stand scrutiny. The social contract, as he gives it, disfranchises all but a single social stratum: Why are others bound by it? The maximin principle, allegedly agreed to under this social contract, requires that we judge allocations by ignoring all but one of societys many strata. This leads in turn to arbitrary judgments including ones which at once increase inequality and decrease the total shared by society. An alternative argument is offered, beginning with a social contract requiring agreement on all inequalities among agents for a series of hypothetical social strata. This device is meant to bind all strata, and leads to a principle of general advantage: Inequalities are just if but only if they serve the advantage of some strata and the disadvantage of none. This seemingly paradoxical rule has a clear interpretation and avoids the main difficulties attributed to maximin justice. Like maximin, however, the new doctrine would evidently require a radical redistribution of income in a society like our own.

Political Democracy as a Property of Political Institutions

The paper contends that political democracy is a matter of degree, a variable property of political institutions. An index for this property, Q, measures the extent to which complex institutions approximate a generalized definition of majority-rule (e.g. that losing coalitions must be smaller than winning or blocking ones.) This index for degrees of political democracy is in turn treated as a function of simpler structural variables, such as decision-rule, the sizes of veto groups, the sizes of groups excluded from decision-making, and simple patterns of representation. Finally, it is suggested that there is no necessity that more democracy produce more satisfaction with outcomes, but that this property does set a “maxi-min” constraint on rates of satisfaction: the more democratic an institution, the larger is the smallest possible proportion of a group (or “domain”) which can be satisfied with any single (binary) outcome.

Comment on Wildgen's "The Measurement of Hyperfractionalization"

I read John Wildgen’s often intelligent note with some interest. Since a material response to the paper’s technical content is readily extrapolated from an already published book (Rae and Taylor, 1970), I will confine myself to a note on the intuitive basis of Wildgen’s discussion. The essential assumption seems to be that, frequency ratios being constant, degrees of competition or dispersion are linear with the number of units (e.g., parties or other groups). Observing that one index (F) fails to give a linear response to increasing numbers of units, he proposes that it be supplemented with another (I), which does. My own views are these:

Making Life Work in Crowded Places

The author of City: Urbanism and its End (2003) recounts his stint as Chief Administrative Officer of New Haven, Connecticut under that city’s first Black mayor and during one of its toughest fiscal crises. The piece seeks, first, to interpret the failure of Black political succession, which is increasingly evident in many American cities, and to chart the changing features of urban regimes such as New Haven’s. Among the regime changes to which the paper gives special attention are: (1) the decline and delocalization of business, (2) the shift of labor politics from private to public (and nonprofit) institutions, (3) the rising importance of well-capitalized nonprofits such as hospitals and universities, (4) the declining significance of political parties, and (5) the expanding importance of state government in local governance.

Some Ambiguities in the Concept of Intensity

Despite its central role in democratic theory, and the attention paid it by economists and psychologists, the concept of intensity is used ambiguously in political science. In their analysis of this concept Rae and Taylor make no effort to prescribe techniques of measurement but focus on the problems of its use in political theory. Even here, the difficulties seem so serious that one wonders whether the concept can really be useful to the theorist. It may be that these conceptual ambiguities will prevent effective measurement as well, a point the authors do not touch upon.

Majoritarianism and Majority Rule

Majoritarianism and majority rule prove to be an aspiration for regimes in upcoming decades. In comparison with minority rule, majority rule proves to favor political equality and is efficient at coordinating voter preferences to outcomes. In addition, majority rule can trump formal rationality in terms of voting preferences and become skewed when incorporated with proportional representation and other complex institutions. In context to the shifting economic power occurring in the world, many states throughout the world have been slow to incorporate majority rule in their respective states. Through case studies, one sees the struggles and limits of introducing majoritarianism in political regimes.

Books in Review : THE CITIZEN AND THE STATE by George J. Stigler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xii, 209.

our democracy is mainly business. His principal complaint is that the job is badly done: government regulation of business is meant to help business but happens not to do so. His book is about the reasons for this failure and about a philosophy of market society. He succeeds at economics and fails at philosophy. Stigler is a conventional neoclassicist, deeply and blindly committed to the doctrine of efficiency, to liberty, and to the proposition that free markets promote both of these ends. The neoclassical idea of efficiency is what becomes of utilitarianism once Bentham’s silly arithmetic is abandoned. If one cannot add and subtract standard International Utilities, yet wishes to maximize utility in a whole society, he will recommend that we look for those arrangements which make everybody happy enough that any improvement for one person must impose a cost on somebody else. This, say the economists, is what free markets accomplish. Economic liberty allows people to keep trading until they can find no further deals that work out to mutual advantage. Under free markets, resources will be distributed so efficiently that