JAMES S. COLEMAN

N EGOTIATIONS, promises, inducements, threats, and bargains constitute
the major mechanisms through which social choices are resolved and
through which actors with differing interests manage to make mutual
gains when it first appears that one of them must necessarily lose.

Yet in systems of collective choice, such as committees and legislative
bodies, the use of these devices is often regarded with suspicion or disfavor,
sometimes extending as far as legal constraints. Similarly, in other actions,
which involve no public choice, certain negotiations and deals are similarly
illegal: a policeman's acceptance of bribery for not enforcing the law, collu-
sion leading to price-fixing by business firms, under-the-counter payments by
contractors.

Why are these actions either illegal or illegitimate? And why, on the
other hand, are certain of these actions, or actions very like them, seen by
some social scientists and by some politicians as the principal means for re-
solving issues of social choice? It would be easy, but only a partial truth, to
say that the citizen's view of legislative deals is distorted by the fact that they
are often made secretly and by the suspicion that the parties to them are
profiting unduly. It would also be easy to say that both sides are correct: that
some such deals and negotiations are beneficial to the system, while others

-221-