During class last Thursday, we discussed a "non-question" on the exam that would show why the default decision-making process is a simple majority vote. The argument for simple majority, and why it most often minimized the sum of external and decision-making costs, was that if less than a majority can pass a law, we would see instances of Law A and Law ~A (which merely reverses or nullifies Law A) both being passed and nothing getting done.
This made me think of the House vs. Senate stand-off before the government shutdown a few weeks ago, mentioned in this WSJ article. The main issue was that the budget passed in the Republican-controlled House would eliminate funding for Obamacare, kept being rejected by the Democrat-controlled Senate in favor of a bill that kept Obamacare fully funded, and vice versa. Although both the House and Senate use simple majority to pass their bills, unanimity is required between the two chambers. This means that if either one of the two bodies is controlled by a minority, bills can be passed with less than a simple majority, if we assume the decision-making body as a whole to be both the House and Senate combined. Thus, we can place the Obamacare funding/no-funding fight perfectly into the framework of a "Law A and Law ~A" situation that constantly pass and cancel each other out.
This leads me to believe that based on Chapter 6 in the Calculus of Consent, Buchanan and Tullock would not consider a Congress with the House and Senate being controlled by different parties to be an efficient decision-making system at all. The budget fight and resulting government shutdown provides a lot of evidence to support this.
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