In the previous chapter, we discussed how political institutions might be used to determine public policies that advance the interests of all citizens. We saw that under certain special conditions, the simple majority rule is the optimal rule for revealing individual preferences. It is also the voting rule that is almost universally used by legislatures and other collective decision-making bodies. For many people, democracy is equivalent to majoritarian democracy. Most countries also have lists of individual rights as parts of their constitutions, and courts sometimes overturn acts by the legislature that are deemed to violate these rights. Constitutional rights allow a small subset of the population to negate the will of the people as expressed using the simple majority rule in the legislature. This feature of constitutional rights has puzzled some scholars. In this chapter, we discuss the nature of constitutional rights and their role in advancing the welfare of citizens in a liberal democracy. We then go on to contrast them with various other notions of rights like natural and cosmopolitan rights.

The Choice of Voting Rule

A constitutional convention must address many issues – whether to establish a federalist or unitary state, whether to create a two-party or a multiparty system, and so on.