Non-Majoritarian Institutions - A Menace to Constitutional Democracy?

Stefan Voigt

No 68, ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics

Abstract: Over the last couple of decades, non-majoritarian institutions (NMIs) have been introduced in many countries. Of late, they have been criticized as promoting technocracy to the detriment of democracy. A number of political scientists even argue that they would strengthen populists and be, hence, one reason for democratic backsliding. This paper does three things: It firstly briefly discusses the empirical evidence for the claim that NMIs have strengthened populists. It secondly argues that not all NMIs are born equal and therefore proposes a taxonomy enabling us to distinguish different types. And it finally discusses the question how the delegation of policy-making competence to experts can be legitimized relying on a specific version of social contract theory. To develop the argument, the interdependence cost calculus developed by Buchanan and Tullock (1962) is modified by explicitly including the respective decision-making procedure, distinguishing between direct democracy, representative democracy, and expert decision-making.

Keywords: Nonmajoritarian institutions; constitutional democracy; technocracy; independent regulatory agencies; populism; social contract theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 K38 P51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-law and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ilewps:68

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