Neighborhood Futures: Citizen Rights and Local Control by George Liebmann

Author:George Liebmann [Liebmann, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civil Rights, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351308861
Google: QyFWDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 39950176
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Supermajority Requirements

In suggesting supermajorities as a check on neighborhood assemblies, Benjamin Barber observes: “Civic communities act with the greatest caution in the face of dissent because dissent is a signal that the community itself is in jeopardy. … In this spirit, neighborhood assemblies might want to experiment with requiring near-unanimous consensus in matters of local jurisdiction….”24 In any event, according a minority a veto is not to be deemed inconsistent with democratic principles:

Many scholars seem to have overlooked the central place that the unanimity rule must occupy in any normative theory of democratic government. … At best, majority rule should be viewed as one among many practical expedients made necessary by the costs of securing widespread agreement on political issues when individual and group interests diverge.25

The last proposition as to majority voting has been disputed on the basis that majority rule “minimizes the chances of supporting an issue that fails and opposing an issue that passes.”26

Small political entities can more readily resort to supermajority requirements than large ones:

The expected costs of organizing decisions, under any given rule, will be less in the smaller unit than the larger…. From this it follows that, for those activities which are collectivized … the smaller unit will normally have a more inclusive decision-making rule than the larger unit…. One means of reducing … costs [of reaching agreement] is to organize collective activity in the smallest units consistent with the extent of the externality that the collectivization is designed to eliminate.27

Supermajority requirements minimize the need for judicial review: “The larger the majority required to pass laws restricting individual freedom, the less need there is to protect individual rights in the constitution.”28 Economists assert that they limit logrolling and “gross privilege seeking.”29

In the towns of Colonial Massachusetts “unanimity was … demanded almost as a matter of social decency, so that a simple majority commanded little authority at the local level and scarcely even certified decisions as legitimate.”30 “A politics of consensus was a politics of the compromises necessary to come to a consensus.”31 “[DJiscussion and practice both reflected the assumption that legitimacy was a consequence not of royal assent but of the consent of the governed … a change in the American view of the derivation of authority.”32

The Uniform Common Interests Act regulating condominium and homeowners’ associations—variants of which have been adopted thus far in six states since its promulgation in revised form in 1994—requires an 80 percent supermajority to terminate an association, noting that “unanimous consent from all property owners would be impossible to secure as a practical matter in a project of any size.” There is also a requirement of the assent of 80 percent of all members to impose new use and occupancy restrictions, and a further requirement that existing uses be grandfathered, on the premise that restrictions should be imposed “only by a supermajority and only after providing for protection for those whose use or occupancy may be affected,” an approach reminiscent of an early New England town-meeting.33 The 1994 changes should

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