Single Subject Rules and the Legislative Process

Gilbert, Michael D.

doi:10.5195/lawreview.2006.55

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Another area for further exploration would utilize the public choice techniques of examining aggregation mechanisms (Gilbert 2006;Cooter and Gilbert forthcoming). This branch of public choice analysis has been relatively underdeveloped (Levmore 2005) but may have important normative payoffs both about how constitutional design ought to proceed and about structuring decision-making processes under the constitution.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Choice and Constitutional Design

Ginsburg¹

2010

Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law

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This chapter reviews the literature on public choice theory and constitutional design, focusing in particular on the sub-discipline of constitutional political economy. The basic framework of constitutional political economy has been in place for several decades and has produced some important insights into particular institutions. Other institutions, however, have been ignored, and there is a relatively small amount of empirical work testing the propositions. The chapter summarizes the work to date and identifies areas for more attention in the future. The chapter first reviews the core assumption that constitutional politics are really different than ordinary politics, and the corollary that the constitutional level is more likely to produce public-regarding behavior. It finds these assumptions to be less than fully convincing, in part because constitutional endurance seems to require some level of interest group behavior, and because constitutions can be transformed through amendment.Thanks to Adam Fleisher and Emily Winston for excellent research assistance. Thanks also to Daniel Farber and Saul Levmore for helpful comments and to Maxwell Stearns for sharing a draft of his forthcoming volume with Todd Zywicki (2009). Online readers should note that this piece will appear in a larger collection of papers, and so intentionally leaves many particular topics of interest to other papers in the volume. 2 Public choice and the centrality of constitutional designConstitutional design is a central concern of public choice and its related discipline of constitutional political economy. Public choice, typically described as the application of economics to political science, seeks to understand problems of aggregating preferences in collective decision-making (Mueller 1997; Farber and Frickey 1990). Constitutional political economy focuses more narrowly on the role of rules in structuring and constraining decision-making, shifting the terrain from choice within rules to the choice of higher order "constitutional" rules. As Buchanan and Brennan (1980 at 10) put it, "If rules influence outcomes and if some outcomes are "better" than others, it follows that to the extent that rules can be chosen, the study and analysis of comparative rules and institutions become proper objects of our Arrow famously showed that under certain plausible conditions, there is no voting mechanism, or indeed any other mechanism, that is guaranteed to prevent cycling among options in pairwise voting:any choice that beats another will in turn be beaten when paired against the third. The outcome of such 3 a decision-making process will depend entirely on the way in which the choices are presented. Thus control over the agenda is crucial for determining outcomes (Cooter 2000, pp. 38-46). Because the outcome of collective choice mechanisms was inherently unstable and reflected mere agenda control or perhaps insincere voting on the part of strategic actors, the idea that collective choices reflected the "true" public interest was suspect. ...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Choice and Constitutional Design

Ginsburg¹

2010

Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law

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“…This is perhaps best illustrated by the practice of logrolling and the acceptance of non-germane amendments (riders) in some legislatures. (Gilbert 2006. Carson et al 2013.)…”

Section: Subdivisionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scopes, Options, and Horizons – Key Issues in Decision Structuring

Hansson

2018

Ethic Theory Moral Prac

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Real-life decision-making often begins with a disorderly decision problem that has to be clarified and systematized before a decision can be made. This is the process of decision structuring that has largely been ignored both in decision theory and applied decision analysis. In this contribution, ten major components of decision structuring are identified, namely the determination of its scope (the issues to be covered by the decision), subdivision (if and in that case how the decision will divided into separate parts), agency (who will make the decision), timing, options, control ascriptions, framing, horizon (the consequences and other aspects of outcomes that will be taken into account), criteria (of success) and (provisions for) restructuring. Four of these components, namely the scope, subdivision, options, and horizon of a decision, are subjected to a more detailed analysis.

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“…Justifying single-subject provisions as a means to reduce the prevalence of logrolling represents an attempt to bolster the welfare effects of majority (or supermajority) requirements for the passage of legislation. 36 Such arguments typically begin with the presumption that 34 These factors are also discussed, though from a somewhat different perspective, by Gilbert (2006). 35 Of course, this is not to imply that the the impact of single-subject provisions on interbranch (legislative-executive) policy making is not interesting or important.…”

Section: Ated 33mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The inter-branch rationale is particularly important on its own in cases in which one wants to distinguish between imposing single-subject restrictions on the legislative process versus imposing them on direct democracy processes. 36 Gilbert (2006) draws a sharp distinction between logrolling and "riding." In his conceptualization, logrolling occurs when the legislature enacts a bill composed of policies that each would fail to secure sufficient votes for passage on their own, while riding occurs when a policy is added to a bill consisting of a policy that does possess the requisite logrolling is properly considered distasteful because it allows otherwise inchoate coalitions of legislators to bind themselves together in pursuit of their own, presumably narrowly construed, interests at the expense of the collective welfare of the citizenry as a whole.…”

Section: Ated 33mentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Choice and Legitimacy

Patty

Penn

2014

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Governing requires choices, and hence trade-offs between conflicting goals or criteria. This book asserts that legitimate governance requires explanations for such trade-offs and then demonstrates that such explanations can always be found, though not for every possible choice. In so doing, John W. Patty and Elizabeth Maggie Penn use the tools of social choice theory to provide a new and discriminating theory of legitimacy. In contrast with both earlier critics and defenders of social choice theory, Patty and Penn argue that the classic impossibility theorems of Arrow, Gibbard, and Satterthwaite are inescapably relevant to, and indeed justify, democratic institutions. Specifically, these institutions exist to do more than simply make policy - through their procedures and proceedings, these institutions make sense of the trade-offs required when controversial policy decisions must be made.

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Single Subject Rules and the Legislative Process

Cited by 16 publications

References 1 publication

Public Choice and Constitutional Design

Public Choice and Constitutional Design

Scopes, Options, and Horizons – Key Issues in Decision Structuring

Social Choice and Legitimacy

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