Buchanan and Tullock argue that larger supermajority rules reduce tyranny of the majority but should have no effect on the passage of mutually advantageous policies. The authors test this argument by separately analyzing the effect of supermajority requirements on taxes that are targeted toward...

Charles Beard ([1913] 2004) argued that the U.S. Constitution was created to advance the interests of people who owned personalty, particularly those at the Constitutional Convention. Because delegate votes on individual clauses at the Constitutional Convention were not publicly recorded, prior...

According to World Bank policy, countries remain eligible to borrow from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development until they are able to sustain long-term development without further recourse to Bank financing. Graduation from the Bank is not an automatic consequence of reaching...

Under the Articles of Confederation, the American states frequently failed to pay their requisitions to the national government, sapping it of revenue. This paper explains the failure to raise revenue from the states by analyzing the system of requisitions in the context of Shays' Rebellion....

It is widely held that in the absence of transaction costs unanimity rule is more effective at producing Pareto improvements and Pareto optimal outcomes than majority rule. We compare unanimity rule and majority rule in their ability to adhere to the Pareto criterion and to select Pareto-optimal...

Little attention has been paid to the differences between absolute majority rule and simple majority rule, which differ in their treatment of absences and ‘votes to abstain’. This article fills that gap by undertaking a probabilistic analysis of the two voting rules assuming two...