ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly reviews the institutional arrangement where unanimity is a formal rule of decisionmaking, and focuses on the principle of rationality involved in constitutional unanimity. Democratic decision-making is most readily observable in legislative bodies. The great amount of unanimous or near-unanimous decision-making in the final stage of the legislative process is a matter of record. Once the typology has been elaborated and illustrated by reference to empirical examples, the chapter examines each type of unanimity in terms of whatever criterion of rationality would seem to be useful. A typology of unanimity has the immediate purpose of locating empirical situations of or hypotheses concerning unanimous decision-making in a consistent schema. The chapter also focuses on institutional arrangements, where unanimity is a formal, constitutional requirement of decision-making, for two reasons—one theoretical, the other methodological. It concludes that certain types of unanimity are not necessarily dysfunctional or symptomatic of a breakdown of the democratic decision-making process.
