Counting the Many: The Origins And Limits Of Supermajority Rule: 10 (Cambridge Studies in the Theory of Democracy, Series Number 10)
Cambridge University Press, 11/18/2013
EAN 9780521124492, ISBN10: 0521124492
Paperback, 252 pages, 21.6 x 14 x 1.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
Supermajority rules govern many features of our lives in common: from the selection of textbooks for our children's schools to residential covenants, from the policy choices of state and federal legislatures to constitutional amendments. It is usually assumed that these rules are not only normatively unproblematic but necessary to achieve the goals of institutional stability, consensus, and minority protections. In this book, Melissa Schwartzberg challenges the logic underlying the use of supermajority rule as an alternative to majority decision making. She traces the hidden history of supermajority decision making, which originally emerged as an alternative to unanimous rule, and highlights the tensions in the contemporary use of supermajority rules as an alternative to majority rule. Although supermajority rules ostensibly aim to reduce the purported risks associated with majority decision making, they do so at the cost of introducing new liabilities associated with the biased judgments they generate and secure.
1. Introduction
Part I. A Remedy for the Problems of Unanimity
2. Prelude
acclamation and aggregation in the ancient world
3. Unanimitas to a two-thirds vote
medieval origins of supermajority rule
4. Unanimity and supermajority rule in eighteenth-century France
Part II. A Remedy for the Problems of Majority Rule
5. Equality, majority rule, and supermajorities
6. Constitutionalism without supermajorities
7. Constitutionalism under complex majoritarianism
8. Conclusion.