IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/sochwe/v23y2004i3p449-464.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Why one person one vote?

Author

Listed:
  • Hans Gersbach

Abstract

We provide a simple justification as to why the core principal in liberal democracies the one-person-one-vote is desirable. We compare two possible constitutions. In a “fixed democracy”, each individual has one vote and the same opportunity to propose public projects. In a “flexible democracy”, those that set the agenda can additionally propose to limit future participation in voting and agenda-setting. We show that a fixed democracy restricts majorities from taxing minorities to a greater extent than a flexible democracy. A flexible democracy may be more suited to enable a polity to undertake public projects. This possible advantage may be too small to outweigh taxation distortions and citizens unanimously favor the one-person-one-vote rule ex ante. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004

Suggested Citation

  • Hans Gersbach, 2004. "Why one person one vote?," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 23(3), pages 449-464, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:23:y:2004:i:3:p:449-464
    DOI: 10.1007/s00355-003-0271-5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-003-0271-5
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s00355-003-0271-5?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Auerbach, Jan U., 2021. "Political competition over property rights enforcement," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 131(C).
    2. Naqvi, Nadeem & Neumärker, Bernhard & Pech, Gerald, 2012. "The rule of law and sustainability of the constitution: The case of tax evasion," The Constitutional Economics Network Working Papers 01-2012, University of Freiburg, Department of Economic Policy and Constitutional Economic Theory.
    3. Nikhil Garg & Ashish Goel & Benjamin Plaut, 2021. "Markets for public decision-making," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 56(4), pages 755-801, May.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:23:y:2004:i:3:p:449-464. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.