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IN THIS ARTILLE IT IS SHOWN THAT IF DURING AN ELECTION EACH VOTER PICKS THE PARTY WITH WHICH HE AGREES ON A MAJORITY PARTY ON EVERY ISSUE.THIS "INVERTED MAJORITY DECISION" RESEMBLES THE STRUCTURE UNDERLYING THE CONDORCET PARADOX AND SIMPSON'S PARADOX.EACH CONCERNS A BELATION OF PAIRWISE DECISION AND POINTS OUT A POSSIBLE PARADOX OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY.

The author of City: Urbanism and its End (2003) recounts his stint as Chief Administrative Officer of New Haven, Connecticut under that city's first Black mayor and during one of its toughest fiscal crises. The piece seeks, first, to interpret the failure of Black political succession, which is increasingly evident in many American cities, and to chart the changing features of urban regimes such as New Haven's. Among the regime changes to which the paper gives special attention are: (1) the decline and delocalization of business, (2) the shift of labor politics from private to public (and nonprofit) institutions, (3) the rising importance of well-capitalized nonprofits such as hospitals and universities, (4) the declining significance of political parties, and (5) the expanding importance of state government in local governance.

▪ Abstract  The United States has undergone a profound spatial reorganization over the course of the twentieth century, and it influences the working of democratic and judicial institutions profoundly. The critical feature is differential access to transportation and place, and the major instrument is of course the automobile. Other technologies—the AC electric grid most fundamental among them—have allowed a finer and finer sorting of the population into relatively homogeneous income strata. The failure of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is a leading example of this phenomenon. The trivialization of local politics—when resources are separated from needs in a region—is another.

This essay criticizes the ideal of consensual decision as it appears in liberal political theory. A historical survey begins with Locke's view of consent, its criticism and extension by 19th century figures such as Godwin, Calhoun, and Mill, its reappearance in the guise of economic efficiency within the works of Wicksell or Buchanan and Tullock and as moral autonomy in Wolff'sDefense of Anarchy. The paper offers a structural account of political decision making in which vulnerability to the authority of others seems inescapable and in which neither unanimity nor a universal right of consent is possible. On this telling, consensual decision is logically unattainable and misdirects constitutional theory.