At the start of Federalist Papers 47, Madison (writing as Publius) notes that there are two ways of conceptualizing the mixed constitution or the division of powers: one (which he associates with the respectable critics of his own proposal) is conceptualized by the following
I conjecture that this balance as a means of achieving a liberal constitutional democracy is poorly implemented by a coercive majority-rule one person one vote, winners-take-all, public decision mechanism that awards gain to the winners, and imposes uncompensated loss on the losers. This seems to motivate voters to form factional coalitions with like-minded others to assemble a majority. This strategizing result seems to be economically wasteful. My conjecture is that it is a consequence of the inability of voters to express their intensity of preference in political/social choice. Such seems not the case for the private sector market economy in which we observe more of a continuum of outcomes. With Ryan Oprea and Abel Winn, we have an experimental paper in PNAS where subjects choose between a proposition -A or not-A (for example a zoning law change that will lower the value of some property, raise that of others) by each submitting a bid expressing their willingness to pay for their preferred option. The winning outcome is that option for which the sum of bids is largest. Since, by definition, the winning sum is larger than the losing sum, each loser can be compensated in the amount they said they were willing to pay. We examine some empirical properties of this public decision mechanism for a small (N=6) and a large (N = 18), collective, under even, close, and landslide cases based on the distribution a values assigned by the experimenters to the Ss. [Equality of means for all might be implemented by giving each citizen the same endowment of bidding currency, say 1000 units.] "C:\Users\vsmith\OneDrive - Chapman University\From_Dropbox\Vernon's Papers (from Expec, etc)\A Compensation Election for Binary Social Choice_oprea-et-al-2007.pdf"
I conjecture that this balance as a means of achieving a liberal constitutional democracy is poorly implemented by a coercive majority-rule one person one vote, winners-take-all, public decision mechanism that awards gain to the winners, and imposes uncompensated loss on the losers. This seems to motivate voters to form factional coalitions with like-minded others to assemble a majority. This strategizing result seems to be economically wasteful. My conjecture is that it is a consequence of the inability of voters to express their intensity of preference in political/social choice. Such seems not the case for the private sector market economy in which we observe more of a continuum of outcomes. With Ryan Oprea and Abel Winn, we have an experimental paper in PNAS where subjects choose between a proposition -A or not-A (for example a zoning law change that will lower the value of some property, raise that of others) by each submitting a bid expressing their willingness to pay for their preferred option. The winning outcome is that option for which the sum of bids is largest. Since, by definition, the winning sum is larger than the losing sum, each loser can be compensated in the amount they said they were willing to pay. We examine some empirical properties of this public decision mechanism for a small (N=6) and a large (N = 18), collective, under even, close, and landslide cases based on the distribution a values assigned by the experimenters to the Ss. [Equality of means for all might be implemented by giving each citizen the same endowment of bidding currency, say 1000 units.] "C:\Users\vsmith\OneDrive - Chapman University\From_Dropbox\Vernon's Papers (from Expec, etc)\A Compensation Election for Binary Social Choice_oprea-et-al-2007.pdf"