Institutionalizing the public interest: The defense of deadlock and beyond

The positive defense of deadlock builds on a particular analysis of what constitutes the public interest. This analysis styles the public interest as the "common good" or as the "general welfare." The Founders themselves had relatively little to say explicitly on that topic, either in their Philadelphia debates or in their Federalist pamphleteering. Like virtually all political writers of the period, the Founders tended to employ the phrase "public interest" with relatively little reflection. This strategy of separating powers among distinct branches of government, each responsible to a distinct partitioning of the populationthe Federalist' strategyis not the only way of pursuing the public interest, conceived in least-common-denominator ways. The Federalist' strategy described above works by taking several cuts through the population and giving each of them an institutional embodiment with a veto over political outcomes. Any proposal contrary to the interests of any nonnegligible proportion of the population would be vetoed in such a referendum.