Guatemala: Unfinished Democracy

Abstract

Dissatisfaction with democracy is widespread, at least throughout the Atlantic world, and has become increasingly obvious since the student revolts of the late 1960s. According to F.A. von Hayek, the limitation in the exercise of power by those who control state agencies is the ultimate cause of such dissenchantment.*1' According to James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, that dissatisfaction with unlimited power is reverted to having been privileged in public choices the almost exclusive use of the majority rule (simple or absolute) , usual in almost all the constitutional systems of the West, with contempt, at the constitutional level, for that of unanimity, which would involve compensatory payments towards those affected by the externalities of majority decisions, a rule nevertheless implicit in the American Constitution or in the Argentine constitution drafted by Juan Alberdi in the middle of the last century.

These authors (2) initiators of the stream of economic analysis of the policy called precisely "the public choice", propose that in addition to privileging the validity of the rule of unanimity at the constitutional level in order to have the consent of the possibly disaffected minorities - since they must endure the double externality of transfers of resources to the public sector and the redistribution of real income - , all legislative negotiations are transparent at the operational level based on ephemeral coalitions ,"logrolling", as the tolerable minimum of public ethics in a democracy.