Intentional Legislation

Abstract

Abstract The story of why legislators’ attitudes should result in the enactment of one particular text over another has obvious significance. But it is not a story that can be read off any constitution, and is told in different ways, featuring different protagonists. For some, it is individual member legislators who call the shots, cooperating on the selection of a decision procedure; for others, it is the collective legislature, as directed either by a mind all of its own or, alternatively, by the application of majority rule to members’ voting intentions. This chapter describes the challenge of reconciling these existing accounts with both (1) the actual content of the statute book, and, (2) legislators’ assumed rationality. Drawing on Robert Dahl’s model of a ‘procedural’ democracy, an alternative version of the story is proposed that overcomes this twin difficulty by identifying legislators’ procedural preferences as the true subject of majoritarian attitude aggregation.