How are unanimity negotiations commonly settled in the EU Council of Ministers? Important contributions have been made to our understanding of the ‘consensual’ decision‐making dynamics in the Council, but most studies focus on explaining the sheer absence of votes in legislative decision making under the qualified majority rule. This study seeks to explain how vetoes are averted, or curtailed, in unanimity decision making. These unanimity negotiations are explained as attempts to induce or prevent high‐level exposure. The degree of exposure in turn depends on the degree of lower level contestation. A process tracing analysis of one prolonged debate is performed from the perspective of one Member State – the Netherlands – which played a very prominent obstructing role. By analysing when, why and where (at what level) the Dutch won or lost, one can come closer to understanding the dynamic interplay between the different Council levels.

Democracy manifests itself in a range of ways and is an imperfect, dynamic struggle for collective decision-making. This article discusses the multifaceted processes of deliberative democratic praxis found in traditional Māori society. Central to decision-making in te ao Māori, hui provide formal and informal structures for deliberative democracy, precedent setting, learning, and transformation through consensus making, inclusive debate, and discussion across all levels of society. Rather than coercion and voting, rangatira relied on a complex mix of customary values and accomplished oratory skills to explore issues in family and community meetings and in public assemblies. Decisions made through inclusive deliberative processes practiced in hui established evident reasoning and responsibility for all community members to uphold the reached consensus. This article claims that practicing deliberative democracy as a fundamental way of life, learned through ongoing active and meaningful participation throughout childhood, improves the integrity of democratic decision-making.

Non-profit organizations (NPO) for mental health are becoming significant actors. Here, their roles in welfare society as understood in research are identified and analyzed. Results from recent research publications on the mental health field are synthesized and categorized in order to find out their origin, theoretical orientation, and view on mental health NPO’s in relation to the public welfare systems. Relevant publications are primarily from the US, empirically oriented, and addressing surveys on both individual and organizational level. NPOs were most often seen as consensus-oriented service organizations, while very few (4%) were seen as conflict-oriented advocates (i.e., anti-professional). It is concluded that these NPOs are most often studied as complements or alternatives to existing public welfare services rather than on their own terms, and that research on the topic lacks more complex theoretical attempts.

Chantal Mouffe's conceptualization of a deliberatively forged consensus as a hegemony and her assertion that adversarial politics best nurtures the conditions of freedom have had a profound influence on contemporary democratic thought. This article takes a critical view of this trend, arguing that a norm of consensus is a very precondition, rather than impediment, for the kind of pluralistic democracy Mouffe and other agonists wish to promote. It is asserted that Mouffe's dehistoricized refutation of consensus lacks causal or explanatory relevance to how concrete actors embedded in empirical situations relate to one another and that the very preparedness to find something acceptable about another is at the heart of what it means to treat others justly.

With the help of a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the de Borda Institute and the New Economics Foundation did some research into decision making. The binary majority vote is often inadequate and inaccurate, and it was thought that perhaps a multi-option procedure of preferential voting would be more suitable for a modern, pluralist society. As part of that project, an experiment was conducted on the web, based on a Modified Borda Count. The subject of discussion was the UK controversy about how to fund the political process. After a critique of dichotomous decision making and an introduction to consensus voting, this article describes the experiment, analyses the vote and makes recommendations for any future exercise.

What does a democratically-productive form of mourning look like in America? David McIvor’s Mourning in America and Simon Stow’s American Mourning argue that it entails the embrace of ambivalence about self and other. Democratically-productive mourning pushes against the tendencies toward idealization and demonization. Embracing ambivalence enables us to move to more effective political engagement in the context of both collaboration and conflict. It allows us to understand that the process of mourning must be ongoing both to protect us from political excesses to which we are prone and to push society toward justice.

This article examines the consensus-conflict divide within contemporary democratic theory as manifested in the works of Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and John Rawls. It relates the democratic crisis diagnosis to the presence of this conceptual divide and suggests overcoming it by focusing on the work of Michel Foucault, especially his concept of the “rectangle of the good parrhesia.” Foucault's analysis goes beyond conflict-consensus through its positive and creative reconceptualization of political authority featuring a transformative capacity linked to the idea of telling the truth.

Sums of the ratings that judges assign to wines are a near universal method of determining the winners and losers of wine competitions. Sums are easy to calculate and easy to communicate, but seven flaws make sums of ratings a perilous guide to relative quality or preference. Stars & Bars combinatorics show that the same sum can be the result of billions of compositions of ratings and that those compositions, for the same sum, can contain dispersion that ranges from universal consensus to apparent randomness to polar disagreement. Order preference models can address both order and dispersion, and an example using a Plackett–Luce model yields maximum likelihood estimates of top-choice probabilities that are a defensible guide to relative quality or preference.

In the situation where subjects independently rank order a fixed set of items, the idea of a consensus ordering of the items is defined and employed as a parameter in a class of probability models for rankings. In the context of such models, which generalize those of Mallows, posterior probabilities may be easily formed about the population consensus ordering. An example of rankings obtained by the Graduate Record Examination Board is presented to demonstrate the adequacy of these generalized Mallows' models for describing actual data sets of rankings and to illustrate convenient summaries of the posterior probabilities for the consensus ordering.

This paper presents a bimatrix structure for examining ordinal partial rankings. A set of axioms is given similar to those of Kemeny and Snell (1962) and Bogart (1973), which uniquely determines the distance between any pair of such rankings. The l1 norm is shown to satisfy this set of axioms, and to be equivalent to the Kemeny and Snell distance on their subspace of weak orderings. Consensus formation is discussed.