Publisher： Cambridge University Press
E-ISSN： 1537-5943|65|1|111-119
ISSN： 0003-0554
Source： American Political Science Review, Vol.65, Iss.1, 1971-03, pp. : 111-119
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Abstract
The paper contends that political democracy is a matter of degree, a variable property of political institutions. An index for this property, Q, measures the extent to which complex institutions approximate a generalized definition of majority-rule (e.g. that losing coalitions must be smaller than winning or blocking ones.) This index for degrees of political democracy is in turn treated as a function of simpler structural variables, such as decision-rule, the sizes of veto groups, the sizes of groups excluded from decision-making, and simple patterns of representation. Finally, it is suggested that there is no necessity that more democracy produce more satisfaction with outcomes, but that this property does set a “maxi-min” constraint on rates of satisfaction: the more democratic an institution, the larger is the smallest possible proportion of a group (or “domain”) which can be satisfied with any single (binary) outcome.
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