The first six presidents (1789–1829) vetoed bills far less frequently than their successors. Previous literature affords two competing explanations for this phenomenon. The constitutional norms approach contends that the early presidents used the veto only to reject unconstitutional legislation. The veto bargaining approach argues that the early presidents vetoed fewer bills because the electoral conditions under which vetoes typically occur had yet to emerge. This article accepts some of the insights of the veto bargaining approach, but defends a corrected version of the norms account. This account says the early presidents vetoed fewer bills because they were constrained by a norm according to which “adversarial” vetoes were considered illegitimate. The emergence of the modern veto required discursive legitimation of vetoes for adversarial purposes.
I demonstrate that a set of well-known objections defeat John Stuart Mill's plural voting proposal, but do not defeat plural voting as such. I adopt the following as a working definition of political equality: a voting system is egalitarian if and only if departures from a baseline of equally weighted votes are normatively permissible. I develop an alternative proposal, called procedural plural voting, which allocates plural votes procedurally, via the free choices of the electorate, rather than according to a substantive standard of competence. The alternative avoids standards objections to Mill's proposal. Moreover, reflection on the alternative plural voting scheme disrupts our intuitions about what counts as an egalitarian voting system. Undue emphasis on Mill's version of plural voting obscures three important reasons to reject plural voting in favor of strictly egalitarian voting systems: (1) that certain choices that generate inequalities of political power are morally impermissible; (2) that even chosen inequalities may undermine the potential epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making; and (3) that such choices may undermine citizens' commitments to democracy understood as a joint project.
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