Withdrawing Consent: Polycentric Defenses against Domination

The “consent of the governed” is an idea that is better understood in theory than in practice. In social contract theory, government gains its legitimacy by virtue of the fact that it is an enterprise undertaken by the consent of the parties involved (e.g., Locke [1689] 1821; Raz 1987; Hobbes [1651] 2017). Similarly, in the contractarian paradigm of the constitutional political economy framework, the values and choices of the people involved give a government or any other collective enterprise both its purpose and its claim to efficiency or at least productivity (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Buchanan 1975, 1988). Yet many collective enterprises often operate at a great distance from the majority of the governed, who know little of what their votes and allegiance have purchased and have even less authority to bring about meaningful change. Unlike in market contexts, where consumers are generally free to take or leave the options in front of them, most of us are never given the option to affirm or deny our consent to the political decisions that are made for us.

If a constitutional process is not one in which the entirety of a society is included, the situation becomes even more troublesome. If only a subset of the population has the opportunity to offer their ideas, their concerns, and ultimately their consent, then there is no justification for imagining the collective enterprise to be a legitimate and mutually beneficial one for the entire society (Holcombe 2014). Those whose interests are disregarded during the constitutional process may find that the rules decided upon have entrenched or introduced new political inequalities of the type that kept them away from the table in the first place. As a consequence, critics of social contract theory have objected to the contractarian program on the historical grounds that constitutional processes have rarely been inclusive of women and minority populations (Pateman 1988; Mills 1997).

The absence of the consent of so many of the governed is indeed disturbing for constitutional political economy and other contractarian theories, but hope is not lost. Comparative analysis resurrects the opportunity to meaningfully incorporate ideas of consent into the study of contractarian and self-governing systems. Instead of asking about consent as if it is a switch turned either “on” or “off,” the comparative approach asks for specifics about the extent to which the system is based on the consent of the governed and how the decision to offer or deny consent plays out in a particular institutional context. What are the conditions under which there will be more opportunities to offer or withdraw consent? When will the stakes of the individual decision have a greater impact on collective decision-making processes? The process will inevitably fall short of the contractarian ideal, but the opportunity to identify processes wherein the choice to offer or withdraw consent to be governed is more or less impactful remains.

The search for institutional characteristics that increase the opportunities and stakes of consent has particular salience for people currently on the order-taking end of existing political hierarchies. Where majorities or elites rule, being the “little guy” means having to comply with rules that contradict your own values and interests. This type of domination is limited within consent-based collective processes where action is undertaken only when the whole group can agree.

As such, to increase opportunities to offer or deny consent is to increase the power of the dominated, disenfranchised, and oppressed. Elise Boulding writes, “The discovery by the oppressed that they have power is the discovery that they can gain a kind of dominance through the withdrawal of compliance. This is the power of the women’s liberation movement, and of all liberation movements” (1976, 48). This is also the power of institutional characteristics that operationalize consent.